


Force Unrelenting

by bendingsignpost



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Supernatural
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Skyrim Fusion, Anal Sex, Armor Kink, Blow Jobs, Breathplay, Competitive Castiel (Supernatural), Competitive Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Has Issues, Fear Play, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Horses, Hypothermia, M/M, Mage Castiel, Mage Sam Winchester, Nonverbal Communication, Rimming, Semi-Public Sex, Skyrim Main Quest, Spoilers, Swords & Sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-04 18:06:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14025732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingsignpost/pseuds/bendingsignpost
Summary: Moving at a jog from the stables up to the town gate, they’ve barely rounded the bend to the drawbridge before they can see, clear as day, what the horns are sounding over.“Akatosh,” Sam swears, or maybe invokes.Dean is a little bit more specific in his cursing. “Is that a fucking dragon?”(Destiel Skyrim AU, knowledge of Skyrim a plus but unnecessary)





	1. New Game

They’re still in the Whiterun stables when the horns sound.

 

“Saddle her back up!” Dean orders, pointing to Baby in her stall. Her ears prick forward, his black mare with the temperament of a stallion. Sam’s horse looks less eager about heading back out, much like Sam himself.

 

“We should check with the Jarl first,” Sam insists, tugging on Dean by the pauldron.

 

Dean acquiesces, but nevertheless calls back over his shoulder, “Get them ready!”

 

Moving at a jog from the stables up to the town gate, they’ve barely rounded the bend to the drawbridge before they can see, clear as day, what the horns are sounding over.

 

“Akatosh,” Sam swears, or maybe invokes.

 

Dean is a little bit more specific in his cursing. “Is that a fucking dragon?”

 

It is very clearly a fucking dragon. Dean’s never seen a living one— _no one_ has ever seen a living one—but there’s nothing else this winged, scaly creature could be. It’s massive, larger than a house with wings that could cover wagons. Flame spurts from its mouth, scouring the west road. Something sizable on the ground catches fire. It must be sizable, because you don’t get flames that big off grass. A flash of arcing light shoots back up and the sharp crackle of distant thunder hits Dean’s ears a second later despite the clear skies. Lightning magic.

 

The dragon’s attacking a wagon with at least one mage on it.

 

“Captain!” a voice calls from from the wall.

 

“Jo!” Dean shouts back.

 

“Jarl says not to let it closer to town than the watchtower,” Jo reports.

 

“ _Let it_?” Dean echoes.

 

She stares back from above, just as flabbergasted. “A squad is coming, you’re to take the lead, sir.”

 

“What about me?” Sam calls up.

 

“If you’ve got juice to burn, get back out there,” Jo answers.

 

With one hand, Sam starts building a spell, the power glowing in an ever-tighter sphere above his hand. He dispels it as easy as flexing a muscle. “Yeah, I got it.”

 

The dragon howls across the plains, still circling its burning target on the ground. It’s chasing that wagon, but the mass of flames on the ground stops moving, the horses dead or fled. Fire and ice shoot skyward, barely visible flecks of magic from this distance.

 

“Sam, c’mon,” Dean says, reversing direction back to the horses. “They’re getting killed out there.”

 

“Yeah, and they were leading that thing right toward us,” Sam counters. “If we go out there, it’ll follow _us_ back to town.”

 

“Not if we kill it first,” Dean says. He has his bow. He has his sword and shield. Soon, he’ll have his troops, but for now, he has Sam. Just as good. “Sam, ironflesh up. Now.”

 

Despite their earlier orders to the stablehands, they leave the horses behind, not willing to risk the animals panicking. There’s not a soldier among them who can’t run the distance they need in heavy armor, except for Sam, who’s not a soldier. The court wizard is, as ever, in his robes, but with the glow of alteration magic already covering his skin, he’s the best protected out of all of them.

 

By the time they’re within bow range, the wagon is already a mass of cinders and smoking flesh fifty yards down the road. To the side, running through grass and brush, is a burnt figure glowing with healing magic. The figure ducks behind a boulder, giving off as much smoke as golden light.

 

The dragon roars but doesn’t circle around to continue toasting the mage. Instead, it lands with a great flapping of wings and a bellow of its lungs. Walking on its hind legs and wings like a troll on its knuckles, the dragon knocks its head against the smoldering remains of the wagon. It flings something to the side that looks like a charred corpse, evidently hungering for meat more raw.

 

Dean and his soldiers ready their bows and fire. Sam stands in front of them, the beginnings of a ward already glowing at his fingertips.

 

The dragon looks up from the flaming wreckage and snaps its jaws. A spout of fire spews out of its mouth but doesn’t reach them. Sam sends up the ward anyway just as a hot gust of air blows past them. They keep firing, shooting again and again, many of their arrows burnt out of the air.

 

“We have to get closer!” Dean shouts to Sam. “Men, cover us!”

 

Sam swears but follows through, joining Dean in his charge. They circle to the side, going toward the injured mage behind his boulder by unspoken agreement.

 

It is at this point Dean witnesses the most awesome, stupidest thing he has ever seen in his life.

 

The burnt mage, sufficiently healed, darts out from beneath the cover of his stone. There’s no gleam to his body, no hint of magic armor over the leather he wears, but the man runs directly toward the dragon all the same. He comes at the beast from the side and ducks beneath one massive wing. He reappears on the other side, close to the dragon’s neck as the beast continues to bellow fire in exchange for arrows.

 

The mage leaps, a translucent purple blade conjured into his hand. He lands on the dragon’s long neck, legs straddling the beast below the base of its head, and stabs the creature in the eye.

 

It roars.

 

It rears.

 

It shakes its head, it thrashes its body, and throughout, the mage holds on.

 

“Shoot it!” someone shouts, and there’s a confused second before Dean realizes the noise isn’t coming from his own mouth.

 

“Shoot it now!” the mage yells as the dragon snaps its jaws against a threat it cannot reach. It shoots a blaze into the sky. “Before it takes flight!” the mage might shout, his voice almost entirely lost beneath the roars.

 

The muted clang of Sam renewing ironflesh sounds in Dean’s ear, and then he’s running, sword in hand, shield on arm, running for the dragon’s underbelly as it rears. It tries to slash at its head and the mage upon it with the clawed joints of its wings, but a blast of cold slows its motions down.

 

Under the cover of Sam’s spells and the threat of his men’s arrows, Dean closes in. He stabs where he can reach, counting on relative softness near the groin. For all the dragon is an extinct beast, it is still an animal, and that means major arteries in certain places.

 

Blood gushes out in the path of his blade, thick and strangely cool where a bear’s would be steaming in the chill of the air.

 

Screeching, the dragon shuffles to the side and whips a wing at Dean in a backhanded blow. The impact connects in the chest and he goes flying, rolling across cobblestones and into burning grass. Winded, straining for air, he flounders on his back and onto his front. Something pinches inside his chest itself, and he’s bruised at every seam of his armor. He gropes for his belt pouch only to feel a thin liquid leaking out through the fine chain of this gauntlets, the broken healing potion distinct from the viscous dragon blood coating his lower body.

 

Another roar rips the air, a blast of heat shooting over Dean. He lifts his head in time to see ice and lightning strike the dragon in its chest and head, respectively, and the dragon collapses, the mage still holding on by the hilt of his conjured blade. Just in time, too: the blade winks out of existence and the mage falls off, nearly onto one of the Whiterun guards who decided to close the distance with his warhammer.

 

“Dean!” Sam shouts as the guards do their duty, hacking at the fallen beast’s neck to confirm its death. Sam staggers toward Dean, but the burnt mage is faster. Though visibly pained with each step, the mage runs to him, dropping to his leather-clad knees. His bracers are charred, his cuirass falling from his chest, but the mage himself is surprisingly intact.

 

“Don’t move,” the mage orders in a rough, shout-hoarse voice. It’s not a threat: though his hands glow, the familiar golden glow is the promise of healing. “You’re bleeding out.” He begins to cast, only to frown.

 

“Not my blood,” Dean says, and the man’s face softens.

 

He has no helmet—it likely went flying—but his dark hair has survived to a remarkable degree. His face is darkened by ash and stubble, but his eyes are bright and blue over the magic in his hands. He keeps healing Dean with all the skill to be expected of a Breton. Dean groans as his ribs right themselves but waves off a concerned Sam.

 

“Did you see where my sword went?” Dean asks his brother as the guards continue to chop at the dragon’s neck like so much wood.

 

“Nope,” Sam says. Both he and the burnt mage help haul Dean to his feet, heavy steel armor and all.

 

“Thanks,” Dean says to the burnt mage. He’s tall for a Breton, almost as tall as Dean himself. “Sorry about your wagon.”

 

“Yes,” says the mage. “Are you-”

 

Without warning, the seemingly dead dragon begins to glow.

 

“Behind me!” Dean shouts, immediately stepping in front of the burnt mage. He readies his shield, enchanted with all the elemental resistances Sam could fit on it. Though the dragon doesn’t move, its skin begins to crackle with the growing light. The scales dissolve, adding to the glow.

 

Shoulder to shoulder with Dean, Sam casts a greater ward before them with both hands.

 

The glowing mass of power barrels through the guards toward Dean and Sam. The men recoil but Dean stands firm, only for the light to pass harmlessly through him. Dean turns, thinking to watch the light’s path, but its journey ends immediately behind him, centering on the burnt mage.

 

Arms defensively raised, the burnt mage steps backward before his entire body is lost in the blaze of light. There’s no heat to it, only a strange tang in the air that belies the immensity of its power.

 

Squinting, Dean raises his shield against the light until it lessens. When he lowers his shield, the mage still glows faintly, staring at his own hands.

 

No one says anything.

 

No one dares breathe.

 

Sam breaks the silence first. “What was that?”

 

The burnt mage looks from his hands to the dragon, and his mouth falls open in surprise, in horror.

 

They turn and look: what was before a corpse is now little more than a skeleton. Arrows tinkle to the ground from its bones, and the partial remains of a human corpse now sit in the cradle of its ribs.

 

“Someone you knew?” Dean asks needlessly. He reaches out with his sword hand to grip the man’s shoulder through burnt leather. “You all right?”

 

The mage shakes his head. He looks at Dean with devastation in his eyes and opens his mouth for

 

sound

 

_sound_

 

volume and pressure and _flying_ and _impact_ and Dean gasps on the ground, on his back, heaving in each breath, as dizzy as if he’s still skidding through brambles and dirt.

 

The sound happens again, like the roar of a dragon through a man’s throat. A third time, and then it stops.

 

When Dean manages to sit up, once again bruised and probably a bit broken, it’s to find he’s been thrown thirty feet. It’s also to find Sam holding Dean’s sword to the burnt mage’s throat. Sam’s mouth is moving, but between the distance and the ringing in Dean’s ears, he can’t determine what’s being said.

 

Grunting, he forces himself back to his feet. His men are surrounding Sam and the burnt mage, and everyone seems to be urging calm, or at least surrender. The brandished weapons point toward the surrender option.

 

Sam says something to Dean.

 

“What?” Dean calls back.

 

Sam says it again.

 

“I can’t fucking hear you!”

 

From where he kneels at the edge of the road, the burnt mage looks nearly as apologetic as he does bewildered and angry and grief-stricken. It’s a strange mix for one face, as jarring a combination as that stubble with those pink lips.

 

“Did you do that on purpose?” Dean asks, probably way too loud. He can vaguely hear himself now.

 

The burnt mage shakes his head, a small motion that edges him farther back from the blade at his throat.

 

“You do that again, you get stabbed, understand?”

 

The burnt mage gives him the tiniest of nods. He points to the ruins of his wagon.

 

“Sam, let him look.” Whatever weirdness is going on, the guy’s got people to mourn. They can wait a second. “Any casualties?” Dean uses the hand gesture they typically use during occasions that call for more stealth, and a few of the soldiers sign back injuries. A few, lying prone on the side of the road, sign back nothing at all. Potions are swapped around to those who can still use them, and those who escaped the dragon unscathed keep a close eye on the burnt mage as he shifts through the charred boxes and crackling leather bags on the overturned remains of the wagon.

 

Sam presses a vial into Dean’s hands and once Dean’s done chugging, he feels a lot better. He can even hear again, though that might simply have been a matter of time.

 

“What just happened?” Dean asks. “Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear-”

 

“Dragonborn, yeah,” Sam interrupts with a nod.

 

The Nord blood in Dean takes offense at a Breton pretending to that title, but then, maybe Sam’s wrong. Then again, a living dragon.

 

“We’re taking him back to the Jarl,” Dean says. He’s still a bit too loud, but it’s for both the benefit of his men and for the burnt mage. If the guy wants to run, he can, but he won’t be going anywhere quickly with an arrow to the knee.

 

For his part, the burnt mage nods. Holding up a hand with a simple raised finger, no readied spell, he looks away from all of them and lets out another earth-shattering roar. Ash goes flying. Rocks whip themselves off the ground. The burnt mage pauses before trying again, and it’s only slightly quieter than the last roar.

 

“You can’t talk anymore?” Sam asks.

 

Shaking his head, the burnt mage covers his mouth.

 

“It’ll be a lot harder to get to the bottom of this, then,” Dean says, because of course that’s their luck.

 

Lips pressed together tightly, the burnt mage holds one hand flat while moving his other hand across it, index finger and thumb pinched together.

 

“We’ll get you something to write on in Dragonsreach,” Sam promises, nodding. “But we’re going to have to gag you if you’re seeing the Jarl. Just to be safe.”

 

Eyes rolling skyward, the man sighs—before clapping both hands over his mouth, eyes wide. When nothing happens, he slowly lowers his hands.

 

“Maybe we should gag you now,” Dean says.

 

The burnt mage hesitates but nods. Between all of them, they’ve two clean tundra cotton handkerchiefs. One goes in the mage’s mouth and the other is tied around his head to keep the first in place. Beyond that, they don’t bind his hands. Technically, he has assaulted the captain of the Jarl’s guard, but Dean’s willing to let that one slide, just this once.

 

Even once gagged, the burnt mage goes back to looking through the items on the destroyed wagon. He ignores the corpses, or perhaps it is more honest to say he avoids them. The stench of charred flesh and burnt hair haunts the air. Finally, the burnt mage stands up with a sizable object cradled in his arms. Wrapped in blackened leather, it’s the size of two books put together and must be even heavier, judging by the strain in the man’s thick arms.

 

Sword sheathed and his shield covering his bow and quiver on his back, Dean holds out his hands. “I’ll carry that.”

 

The burnt mage shakes his head.

 

“Is that what the dragon was after?” Dean asks.

 

The burnt mage goes very still.

 

“Yeah, I’ll carry that,” Dean says, and with an entire squad of soldiers backing him up, it’s not surprising when the mage complies. “We’ll leave two guards here with the wreckage and send someone out to bring the bodies in for proper funeral services. Were they all Bretons?”

 

A head shake.

 

“They merchants? You a mercenary for merchants?”

 

The burnt mage shakes his head but has no way to clarify.

 

As if to reply on his behalf, a great rumbling fills the sky to the south-southeast. It is the sound of immense voices, vaguely human and male. “ _DOV-AH-KIIN_ ,” chant those invisible voices, seemingly from miles away.

 

This, Dean decides, is going to be a very weird day.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was inspired by two things. First, a piece of fanart I can't find involving Castiel (I think) as the Jarl and Dean (pretty sure) as the prisoner brought before him. (If anyone can find it, please link! Thanks!) Second, playing AU Roulette with [Vyc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vyc/pseuds/Vyc), wherein they throw random combinations of things at me and I ramble until it sticks. 
> 
> Some fun bits for this 'verse are hidden in the races and classes I've gone with for our three leads. For those of you not familiar with Skyrim, I'm going to be putting in little explanations at the ends of chapters for added clarity, though I hope the story will stand well enough on its own that these will be more like fun extras. 
> 
> Dean and Sam are Nords, which means they get the following stat boosts:  
> Block: +5  
> Light Armor: +5  
> Smithing: +5  
> Speech: +5  
> One-Handed: +5  
> Two-Handed: +10  
> 50% resistance to cold
> 
> ...So yeah, Sam is hilariously mis-classed as a Destruction/Alteration mage with Enchanting and Alchemy, whereas Dean can check every box except Light Armor. Enjoy the accidental commentary on characters living up to stereotypes and expectations. 
> 
> On the other hand, we have Castiel as a Breton:  
> Alchemy: +5  
> Alteration: +5  
> Conjuration: +10  
> Illusion: +5  
> Restoration: +5  
> Speech: +5  
> 25% resistance to magic
> 
> Castiel is a pretty decent fit for expectations with heavy magic use, specifically Conjuration (summoning creatures and weapons and, oh, hey, _trapping souls_ ), Destruction, and Restoration (healing). 
> 
>  
> 
> As always, updates are on Mondays. To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading, everybody, and I'll see you next week!


	2. Continue

On the throne of Dragonsreach sits Jarl Henriksen the Victor. He is considered crafty rather than wise, an assessment that may change as his hair grays. For now, his black hair remains darker than his skin, and with the remaining strength of his middle age, he is still best known for his physical prowess.

 

If he is at all impressed by having a gagged Dragonborn brought before him, he gives no sign.

 

With a large amount of paper, ink, and quills, the burnt mage reveals his story, and Sam reads it aloud for him. His name is Castiel. He comes with a tablet, the aptly named Dragonstone, which should reveal the locations of dragon burial mounds. This, Castiel stresses with the underlining of various key words, is very important now that dragons are coming back to life. Castiel is certain it heralds the end of the world.

 

Jarl Henriksen doesn’t look terribly impressed by this either.

 

“Regardless of whether you’re right,” says the Jarl, “the Greybeards have summoned you, and you clearly need their instruction. I’m told they have knowledge of the dragon’s language. Go to High Hrothgar, and you may solve both of your problems.”

 

Castiel frowns. He resumes writing.

 

“My liege,” Sam says, “I don’t think it would be wise to send a man alone out into Skyrim without the ability to speak. And if Castiel—am I saying that right?”

 

Castiel shakes his head, still writing. Reading over Castiel’s shoulder, Dean sees Castiel is after much the same thing Sam is.

 

“If, uh, Cas needs to stay at High Hrothgar until he can control his voice, that’s all the more time it will take until we know where these threats will come from. We don’t know how many burial mounds are scattered across your hold. Bad enough for a barrow to erupt with draugr, but a dragon?”

 

“If you wish to go with him, say it,” Jarl Henriksen instructs.

 

“Dean and I want to go with him,” Sam says.

 

Castiel looks up at that. Though his face is proud throughout, he clasps his hands together and kneels before the jarl. His posture speaks of begging, but his eyes make a dignified request.

 

“It would be to all our benefit,” Sam continues.

 

“Captain, what say you?” Jarl Henriksen asks.

 

“If Sam’s going, so am I,” Dean says. “I understand my responsibilities as your captain, sir, and they’re to more than just one city, no matter how grand.”

 

“Drop the politics, Dean,” Jarl Henriksen orders.

 

“I think it would be damn stupid to ignore this,” Dean says. “Sam can try his hand at deciphering the Dragonstone’s map on our way, but I don’t want to risk two mages getting attacked on the road and running out of magicka. For all we know, there will be more dragon attacks out there, especially if the dragons really are after this tablet. We should get it out of here.”

 

Jarl Henriksen nods. “Take tonight to gather supplies. You depart in the morning.”

 

“Cas needs new armor,” Dean says despite the clear permission and dismissal. “And a horse wouldn’t go amiss. He did help us take down a dragon today, I think that deserves a reward.” The dragon bones should fetch a pretty price, more than enough to compensate the families of the guards they lost today.

 

“Equip him from the armory,” the jarl allows.

 

Castiel nods his thanks.

 

“No time like the present,” Dean says, leaving Sam with the tablet. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.”

  
  


In the armory, Castiel strips down to his smallclothes. His body is thick with muscle, far more than Dean has grown to expect from mages. Mages besides his brother, that is; a childhood spent hunting vampires under their father’s tutelage has had lasting effects.

 

Castiel, however, is very different from Sam. Tall enough that he can’t be called stocky, but not towering. He’s muscled and firm, and his skin is remarkably devoid of scars as he washes the ash and grime of the day from his body. The cloth from the washbasin grows gray, then black, leaving trails of dirty water to run down to his bare feet on the stone floor. Remarkably unperturbed about the gag, Castiel looks curiously at Dean, catching him watching. He tilts his head in question.

 

“You’re a light armor guy, right?” Dean asks, as if he’d only been waiting for that confirmation.

 

Castiel nods. He lifts his hand in another question, touching the gag stretching his mouth open.

 

“As long as you keep your mouth shut,” Dean allows.

 

With another nod, Castiel removes the gag. He works his mouth after, moistening his tongue, stretching his jaw. Dean looks away. “I think I’ve figured out your size,” he says, because that’s a good excuse for perving on a guy.

 

He brings back the leather armor, the style a much more distinctly Skyrim fashion than Castiel’s previous set. Castiel had recovered his helmet from the road, but beyond that and his boots, everything else needs replacing, even much of the underlayers.

 

Castiel nods his thanks before gesturing at Dean’s lower body. Dean nearly perks up at that, and in more than one way, before he realizes what Castiel actually means.

 

“Yeah, it’s a lot of blood, isn’t it.”

 

Dean strips down as well, a much more difficult process with his heavy steel plate. Approaching slowly, Castiel holds out both his hands, a question in the tilt of his head and frustration clear on his face.

 

Dean still understands. “Yeah, I could use a hand.” He directs Castiel through the first pieces of unfastening and unbuckling, but the mage seems familiar with heavy armor. Soon enough, Castiel is undressing him in a mutual silence.

 

With that done, Castiel begins pulling on the new-to-him leather armor. He might be big for a Breton, but he makes an average-sized Nord. Dean watches him inspect the fit while he scrubs his own legs down, staining another washcloth at the basin. They really need fresh water in there now, but Dean finds himself reluctant to call for some. It’s a strangely companionable silence between them, no matter how violent its necessity.

 

Dean scrubs himself as thoroughly as he cares to before sitting down in his smallclothes and tending to his armor. The greaves have taken the worst of the blood, but at least the stuff doesn’t seem to have any absurd alchemic qualities to it. The metal isn’t pitted or etched in the wake of the mess, a small mercy in an otherwise merciless day.

 

Suited up, Castiel tests the fit of the armor like someone used to wearing it. Again, strange for a mage. The amulet he pulls out of the pile of burnt leathers is a bit more normal, no matter how the sight of the round talisman makes Dean’s stomach lurch. Before Dean can read too far into Castiel carrying around an Amulet of Mara, Castiel tucks the talisman under his leather cuirass.

 

Right. It’s an enhancement for restoration magic, not just a symbol of readiness to wed. No different from the Amulet of Stendarr Sam gave Dean all those years ago to steady his shield arm.

 

“Were you planning on going to High Hrothgar?” Dean asks. Castiel turns around, a question back in his eyes. “I mean, you were bringing the Dragonstone to somewhere. The mage college?” It’s the only place he can think of with the research materials to decode this thing, outside of Sam. Most of the time, it seems like Sam’s got half the college library in his head.

 

Castiel rocks his head from side to side, not nodding, not shaking it, before he reaches for Dean’s hand. Dean gives it to him, and Castiel traces tickling letters into his palm.

 

“Friend? You got a friend in Skyrim?”

 

A nod.

 

“You know where they are?”

 

A shake of the head.

 

“Great,” Dean says. “High Hrothgar it is.”

 

Castiel nods. He pulls Dean’s hand back to him and traces another word.

 

“Sleep?” Dean says, making sure he’s got that right.

 

Castiel nods before pointing around the room.

 

Oh. “Yeah, we can figure out a place for you. Not sure the troops would be comfortable with you down in the barracks, after today, but Sam’s got a room of his own behind the enchanting table. Bet he’d let you grab some floor space.” After all, it’s not like they can dump the guy off at an inn while he can’t talk without flinging bodies and destroying ears.

 

Castiel doesn’t look terribly pleased about that, but he nods his thanks anyway.

 

“He’ll have questions,” Dean warns. “You’ll be doing a lot of writing.”

 

Castiel indicates that he’s all right with this. He points at Dean.

 

“Do I have questions?”

 

A nod.

 

“Yeah, but you don’t got paper.”

 

A faint smile. He points at Dean’s armor.

 

“You know how to care for it properly?”

 

Another nod.

 

“Great, pull up a chair.”

 

They’re still like that when Sam comes to find them, having had much the same idea about Castiel’s sleeping prospects for the night. They leave the rest of the armor for a housecarl and Dean joins the pair of them for dinner upstairs in his gambeson. Stomach full of hot stew and grilled leeks, Dean sees about their supplies over the rest of the evening, but when he turns in for the night, he takes the long way to the barracks and looks in to Sam’s rooms. The candles are out in his office, the only light in the room coming from the surface of the enchanting table and a thin, flickering line under the door to his bedroom.

 

The sound of Sam’s voice is faint. It’s excited and curious and stops to let Castiel write his responses. They’re getting on well, then. None of that mage superiority leading to butting heads. That’s good. Should make for an easier trip.

 

Dean makes his way around the immense firepit in the center of the long hall and goes downstairs to his soldiers and his bed.

  
  


In the morning, they eat, armor up, and saddle up. Baby is ready to go as always, the beauty that she is. She noses at Sam for treats but, when denied, returns to Dean for the cost of nothing more than simple affection. The Dragonstone rides in Castiel’s saddlebag on his borrowed gray mare, a tired thing named Connie. It’s short for something, but Dean immediately forgets what.

 

Sam mounts Charger, a gelding with something to prove that, sadly, will never be proven. Especially not with Baby in the picture for comparison.

 

Dean takes the lead out of Whiterun, heading east past the brewery and the southern road to Riverwood. It’s not the friendliest area, but it’s far from the worst. He knows for a fact that the closest bandit lair is still empty, not unless they’ve had newcomers since he and Sam took some of the troops to empty it out yesterday.

 

Sam points it out to Castiel as they pass, his voice easily carrying downwind to Dean despite the pattering of rain and their horses’ plodding steps. Castiel rides silently in the middle, following Dean and staying within Sam’s sight in case Castiel needs to signal them for something. It’s a practical arrangement, but every time Sam talks to the guy, Dean tenses against another verbal blast from behind.

 

Cas never does answer aloud no matter how Sam chats with him, and Dean turns his focus on the land ahead of them. It’s a simple enough path, keeping to the road. They’ll journey to the east border of the Whiterun Hold. There, leaving the land Dean knows best, they’ll turn south through Eastmarch and follow the river to the southeast. Before they reach Fort Amol, they’ll turn off the main road to take the switchback trail up the hillside until they reach the village of Ivarstead.

 

Making good time, they’ll arrive at Ivarstead by noon tomorrow and spend the night at the inn before attempting the seven thousand step climb to High Hrothgar. It’s a simple, solid plan that could easily be waylaid by bandits or frostbite spiders. Or simple weather. If it keeps raining like this, they’ll have to give up on the switchback trail and take the long way around, crisscrossing the river down into the middle of the Rift.

 

The sun slowly makes its appearance as they make their way around the foothills, the road following the river from a great height. The horses circle around puddles with trepidation, but Baby tramples a pair of skeevers with pride. A trio of wolves hunker by the side of the road, but when Dean catches sight of them, he raises a hand to signal Sam.

 

 _Caution,_ he signs without looking back to his brother. _Wolves. Ice magic._

 

With a pause exactly the length of the spell’s casting time, Sam shoots off jagged shards of ice at the crouching wolves. The animals jump back, hackles raised, teeth bared, but ultimately turn tail in favor of easier prey.

 

From behind, Castiel rushes his horse forward, but before Dean can stop the idiot from giving chase, Castiel pulls up short beside Dean. He points to Dean and sloppily replicates the motions for _caution, wolves, ice magic._

 

“Oh,” says Dean, resisting the urge to smack himself on the head. “Right, that’s a good way for you to talk, huh?”

 

A cross between pissed and eager, Castiel nods.

 

Dean twists around in his saddle. “Sam, you wanna teach him or take point?”

 

“I’ll take point,” Sam decides. “You use them more than I do.” He maneuvers Charger around them, the gelding’s hooves crushing lavender and blue mountain flowers as they pass. The scents linger in the air, noticeable even above the familiar smells of their animals.

 

Baby immediately takes offense at not being in front, but Dean shushes her reassuringly and she calms with a resentful snort. Castiel gestures at him impatiently.

 

“We typically use these where stealth is called for, not conversation,” Dean explains. “You’ll be able to signal if you see something, at least.” Castiel nods in reply and Dean shows him the basic signals. Safety, caution, danger. Wolf, sabre cat, bear. Spider and mudcrab, which look a lot alike. Since they’re going up into the mountains, Dean adds in troll and ice wraith. Once Castiel can repeat all of those, Dean adds the sign for a human foe and all the variations that follow: melee, archer, mage. It helps pass the time well enough even if it doesn’t transform Castiel into a scintillating conversationalist.

 

“We should make one for dragons, too, huh?” Dean reflects.

 

Castiel nods and responds with a gesture moving away from his closed mouth, his fist opening with the motion, fingers like flame.

 

“That works.”

 

By noon, the sun has come out enough that Dean nearly feels dry. More importantly, so does the ground. They should be able to take the switchback after all. For now, they stop for lunch, more for the horses than themselves. There’s a good pasture here, despite the mountainside territory, and the grasslands will remain until the road descends down toward the river and Valtheim Towers.

 

Those watchtowers linger in the back of Dean’s mind, a good reason why they’ve stopped before the towers are in sight. If he can see the towers, anyone on the towers can see them, and Dean knows better than most how infrequently Whiterun guards patrol all the way out to the border, regardless of their actual orders. It’s a full day’s journey, out and back, and that’s on horseback. If there was coin to spare to build another fort or an outpost along the road, it might be a different story. The towers are too small to house the troops they’d need to man them, but bandits aren’t so fussy about space.

 

“What are you thinking up ahead?” Sam asks, cutting a piece of cooked beef off a larger strip of jerky from his saddlebag. He pairs it with a small hunk of cheese to counteract the absurd amount of salt involved and Dean does the same. Castiel makes the mistake of biting into the jerky without the cheese buffer, and the betrayed look on his face is worth a laugh.

 

“Dean, seriously,” Sam says, and Castiel starts paying attention at that, head cocked to the side.

 

“Latest report is that they cleared it out again, but that was a week ago,” Dean says. In front of Castiel, he doesn’t add that he’s not sure how well he believes those reports. Bandits holed up in the towers like to play the toll game, and bandits with coins lead to guards with bribes.

 

Castiel signs for _danger, melee_ with a question in his eyes.

 

“Yeah, probably some archers too.”

 

“You’re thinking of leaving Cas here with the horses,” Sam guesses, and he’s right on the septim.

 

Castiel looks at Dean sharply.

 

“We’ll be right back,” Dean promises. “I’ve got good armor, and when Sammy ironfleshes up, he can take an arrow to the face, no problem.”

 

“Yeah, how about I _never do that again_ ,” Sam says.

 

“You’re _fine_ ,” Dean says, like his heart hadn’t almost stopped at the sight.

 

Castiel claps his hands together, a sharp motion that pales in comparison to his eyes. He holds out one hand and the dark purple glow of a conjuration spell hovers above his palm.

 

“Look, I know you want to help, but the entire point of us coming is to get you to the Greybeards in one piece,” Sam says, playing reasonable. “Besides, one mistimed grunt and you could fling us both into the river. You sure you can fight with your mouth closed the entire time?”

 

Castiel raises his chin higher in a gesture too curt to be called a nod.

 

“Not risking it,” Dean says. “You stay here and make sure we still have horses when we get back.”

 

Castiel steps up in to Dean’s space and opens his mouth. Dean jerks back, but Castiel doesn’t say anything, just stands there, his open mouth a more effective threat than bared teeth could ever be.

 

“Civilians stay back.”

 

With the slightest shake of his head, Castiel makes a demand with his eyes.

 

“You not a civilian?”

 

A firm shake.

 

“Then you should have told the jarl,” Dean says, not quite daring to poke the guy in the chest. “What group are you with, then? A different hold? Somewhere outside of Skyrim?” He’s a Breton, so it’s gotta be some group in High Rock.

 

Castiel closes his mouth with a definitive click of teeth.

 

“Not gonna tell us, huh?”

 

Stepping in, Sam sets a hand on Dean’s shoulder, a touch felt only by the pressure on his armor. He pushes just enough for Dean to give way. “Is that the group that got you that tablet?” Sam asks. “The Dragonstone?”

 

Castiel goes so carefully blank that the answer is obvious.

 

“Same group your translating friend belongs to,” Dean guesses, and Castiel’s gaze jerks back to him. “Damn, for a guy who isn’t even talking, you’re a shit liar.”

 

Glowering, Castiel doesn’t deny it.

 

“Look,” Sam says. “The more we can trust each other, the easier this trip will be. If you really think you can handle yourself in battle without any talking, you can come, but nothing physical, all right? Destruction magic only, nothing with any risk of grunting, and you can come.”

 

“Sam,” Dean says.

 

“Don’t be like Dad,” Sam shoots back, right in front of a stranger, and it snaps Dean’s mouth shut.

 

Castiel looks between them with a frown, but Sam stays focused on Dean.

 

“C’mon, man, he stabbed a dragon in the _face_ yesterday,” Sam says, and, fine, that’s kind of hard to argue against. “If he can control the shouting thing, I say bring him.”

 

“Fine,” Dean says, “but if I end up drowning in the river because of him, that’s on you.” It’s a dirty, underhanded move, but so was bringing up their father.

 

“Fine,” Sam says. He looks to Castiel. “Don’t kill my brother?”

 

Castiel bobs his head from side to side, making a show of considering it.

 

“Asshole,” Dean calls him, but it’s already decided.

  
  


When they approach Valtheim Towers, the towers are on their left, the river dropping far below in one waterfall after the next. There’s a woman in hide armor out front by a fire with a cooking pot, but the ax hanging at her hip definitely isn’t for chopping vegetables. On top of the closer, southern tower, Dean catches a glimpse of another figure in hide armor. An archer, definitely.

 

“Stop and pay the jarl’s toll,” the woman calls out, which is pretty rich.

 

Riding in the middle, looking every inch a spoiled noble in his robes and enchanted accessories, Sam pulls up on his reins. “You heard her,” he says to Dean ahead of him. “Pay the woman.”

 

Dean rolls his eyes, the motion definitely visible through the open face of his steel helmet, but he climbs down from Baby. With nothing to label him as a Whiterun guard, let alone their captain, he looks far more the part of an expensive mercenary. Castiel in the back probably looks like a cheap one, or a servant in the best armor he has.

 

“Which jarl?” Dean asks. His sword sheathed on his left side, he reaches for his pouch on the right. The bandit’s eyes track his right hand as he fumbles with the fastenings, his left arm weighed down by his shield. “We cross the border yet?”

 

“Jarl Henriksen,” the bandit answers. She has enough sense to look wary, but not enough sense to watch his left hand.

 

Dean nods, because it’s always nice to have that confirmation of wrongdoing before he starts killing people.

 

He shieldbashes her, hard, right up under the chin. Her jaw cracks with a wet crunch made wetter by catching her with her mouth open. She staggers back, bleeding from the mouth, but before she can pull her ax from her belt, Dean has his sword in hand and sweeping across her throat.

 

Immediately, the archer from above fires down, but both Sam and Castiel raise wards over the horses even as they dismount.

 

“The penalty for banditry in the jarl’s lands is death,” Dean formally announces before heading in. The familiar snap of ironflesh taking effect sounds from behind him, and he leans to the side to let Sam pass by him up the short half-flight of stairs at the base of the thin southern tower.

 

Dean stops at the top of that half-flight where wooden floor turns to stone bridge, but Sam keeps going up the entire way, bent on getting to that archer. Dean, on the other hand, plants himself at the mouth of the narrow bridge crossing the river. There’s already another bandit in leather armor coming at him across it, but Dean is less immediately concerned about him than he is about the archer atop the northern tower.

 

He narrows his stance, left foot forward, lining up behind his shield and lifting it just in time to deflect what would have been an arrow to the shoulder. He lowers the shield quickly as the bandit crossing charges forward, battleaxe raised high above his head. Dean steps back as the bandit swings down, but the bandit pulls the swing to the side rather than sinking it into the wooden beams underfoot.

 

Dean comes in for the attack, and the bandit catches him with a two-handed block, Dean’s sword striking across the battleaxe’s shaft. The unlucky bastard doesn’t have gauntlets, though, so Dean lets his blade skitter down the line of metal until it strikes fingers. The bandit shouts, dropping the business end of the axe, and Dean shieldbashes him off the side of the bridge. With their fellow bandit out of the way, the far archer releases another arrow immediately, but it glances off Dean’s plate mail. It’s his neck and face he has to worry about the most.

 

Up above, there’s a shout abruptly cut hoarse. Not Sam’s voice, though, so it’s only good news. With the southern archer down, that’s Castiel freed up from protecting the horses.

 

The weird little mage is quick, too. Only a few seconds later, faster than the next bandit can even cross the stone bridge, Castiel appears beside Dean, a charged spell crackling in each hand. Dean’s narrow stance is the only reason they can fit side-by-side at the mouth of the bridge, but even then, it’s a tight fit.

 

With more arrows raining down from across the river, Dean keeps his shield raised, and Castiel leans in behind it, sheathing one spell to cast a ward instead. Their faces are close, dangerously so with Castiel’s condition, but Castiel catches his eye and clearly has an idea. When the rain of arrows lets up, it could be to exchange volleys against Sam’s ice spells, but it also means the next melee assault is near. Bit of a problem with Castiel much too close for Dean to be able to use his sword.

 

“You gotta move back,” Dean orders.

 

Castiel shakes his head and opens his mouth. It’s a quick motion, open and shut, that conveys his entire plan.

 

Dean cracks a grin. “Go for it.”

 

Pressed up behind Dean’s shield, Castiel lets out an earsplitting, earth-shattering roar. Standing beside him, Dean gets the volume, not the blast, but the three bandits in front of them aren’t so lucky. They go flying, ass over kettle. The one in iron armor goes over the side immediately, plummeting forty feet to a hard impact, armor-inflicted drowning, or both. The leather armor one smacks into the one behind her, and that one falls off the other side of the bridge. Leather armor woman has a sword, though, and she still has it when she recovers from the blast.

 

Dean readies his shield, but Cas just lets loose again. She goes flying all the way across the bridge, smacking into the side of the north tower before falling to her death.

 

A better man than Dean wouldn’t laugh.

 

Dean has never claimed to be a better man.

 

He cracks the fuck up.

 

With the bridge cleared of threats, it’s almost safe to laugh. He manages to keep his shield raised high, in front of both of their faces, but he does need Castiel’s steadying hand on his shoulder to keep himself from fully doubling over laughing. It’s a good thought on Castiel’s part, with Dean’s hands still occupied by sword and shield.

 

“You’re fucking Talos, man,” Dean laughs into a sigh as Sam keeps shooting ice from up above. “Tiber fucking Septim reborn right here, and he’s an Oblivion-taken Breton.”

 

Castiel cracks a smile, and their faces really are too close. There’s not enough space to step back, though. They’re perfectly spaced as they are, taking up the entire width of the bridge with nothing but Dean’s laughter and Castiel’s silent air between them.

 

Across the bridge, the final bandit shouts in pain, a creative pile of cursing that even Dean could learn from.

 

“One of you going to finish him off?” Sam calls down from above. Dean looks up to see his little brother leaning over the edge of the tower.

 

In response, Castiel steps back inside the tower, neatly avoiding the live blade in Dean’s hand. He tilts his head to Dean in a clear _after you_ motion.

 

Both of them is overkill for an archer with a broken hand, but then, killing is what they’re after.

  
  


Their skirmish finished, they confiscate stolen goods. Castiel raises both eyebrows when Dean kneels to take lockpicks to a boobytrapped chest, but he doesn’t question Dean’s less than legal skills any farther than that. He even helps Dean stand back up again, a feat that Sam has long since stopped lending a hand for. Not that the heavy armor slows Dean down that much anymore—he’s been weighted down by iron and steel most of his life—but the show of support is a nice change.

 

With the chest open, Dean heads out to check on the horses. Well, just Baby, but the others are still with her. Besides, with his blood still pumping from the altercation, it’s probably best he put some distance between himself and Castiel. Baby always calms him down.

 

“Hey, girl,” he says, and she immediately presses the side of her neck against his chest. He keeps saying “hey” until she stops pressing. She huffs at him, admonishing, but by then, Sam’s done reclaiming stolen goods. Sam passes Dean a minor stamina potion on his way back to his own horse, taking a healing potion for himself.

 

They mount up and set off, Castiel somehow even more silent than before. Though he still rides beside Dean, the road wide enough to allow it as they weave their way downhill, Castiel no longer signs or gestures. His eyes are fixed ahead, somewhere over Sam’s shoulders, as they all lean back in their saddles. The descent marks the end of Whiterun hold, as well as Dean’s established authority.

 

Dean has a fair guess at why the silent treatment. “You got a problem with us collecting hazard pay?”

 

Turning his head, Castiel blinks at him. He shakes his head and taps a finger to his temple.

 

“You’re just thinking?”

 

A nod.

 

“Yeah?”

 

Holding the reins with one hand, Castiel brings the other to his mouth to make their gesture for dragon. Then he points vaguely over his shoulder, clearly not at anything in particular.

 

“Dragon yesterday,” Dean says.

 

Another nod. Castiel gestures between Dean and Sam.

 

“About us yesterday, rescuing you?”

 

Castiel shakes his head before reconsidering and nodding.

 

“You’re welcome. Something else, though?”

 

Another nod. Another gesture between Dean and Sam.

 

“What about us?”

 

Castiel shakes his head.

 

“Not about us?”

 

Not about them, no, but Castiel keeps gesturing between them.

 

“Brothers?” Dean asks and Castiel points to him in confirmation. Understanding begins to dawn. “The people with you, your family?”

 

With a nod, Castiel slaps his own forearm.

 

“Your… arm family.”

 

Castiel points to Dean’s shield.

 

“Shield-brothers,” Dean guesses and that earns another nod. Which makes no fucking sense, because whoever heard of a mage with shield-brothers? The Companions Guild is one thing with their heavy armor and Nord pride, but a mage? What group does this guy belong to? A smaller group than it was before, definitely. “You’re mourning.”

 

Castiel makes that guilty almost-shrug Dean has seen too many times to take offense at. Life is hard in Skyrim, and death is harder. It’s unpredictable and fast. Even in a city where there are ample shrines to heal illnesses, there are still no guarantees. People grab on quick and learn to let go just as fast. It’s that or break.

 

There’s a reason Dean’s seen more than one couple get engaged the day they’ve met. A helpful stranger wearing an Amulet of Mara stops to chop firewood for a widow, and a week later, the widow’s a wife again. Then again, a month later, the wife might return to widowhood.

 

“Yeah, grief is weird,” Dean says and lets the subject drop. He pulls back, annoying Baby by putting her in the rear of their line. Still, there’s not enough room in the switchbacks down to ride abreast while turning, so some sacrifices have to be made.

 

The hours pass with the miles, equally slow and plodding. They ride along the river, now close to the bank rather than high above it, and there’s a refreshing lack of frostbite spiders. Must be too warm. Dean warns Cas to keep an eye out all the same. Castiel nods and makes the gesture for spider with a questioning tilt to his head.

 

“What about ‘em?” Dean asks.

 

Castiel spreads his hands wide, then has to correct his horse’s confused course. Dean snorts before urging Baby forward to walk alongside Cas and Connie. He gives Cas the basics, all the things he learned early on, growing up in Morthal surrounded by the swamp and spiders. The size, the speed, the best ways to sidestep when they start spitting their venom. It’s so much easier to avoid when he’s not knee-deep in bog.

 

“We’d get trolls, too,” Dean adds. “You know know to deal with those, right? Could be looking at them up on the mountain.”

 

Castiel nods. He motions for Dean to do something until Dean gets the message and shows him the sign for troll again. Castiel signs _troll, ice magic_ and looks at Dean expectantly.

 

“Ice troll, yeah,” Dean says, grinning. “You got it.”

 

Cas signs for troll and spider before gesturing between Dean and Sam again.

 

“Nah,” Dean says. “Most of my work is fighting banditry and Sam’s off doing court wizard stuff.”

 

Castiel frowns.

 

“Not what you meant?”

 

Definitely not.

 

“Us fighting trolls and spiders?”

 

A nod, plus a gesture over his shoulder.

 

“You mean in the past?”

 

That’s a yes.

 

“In Morthal?”

 

A solid yes.

 

“You want to hear about Morthal?” Dean asks, frowning. Is that where he thinks his friend is? Or shield-sibling, or whatever.

 

Castiel nods and points at Dean.

 

“Me in Morthal?”

 

Castiel nods and points to Sam, too. Then he twists to point to the west.

 

“Morthal’s northwest from here.”

 

Castiel shakes his head and emphatically points west, back the way they’d come.

 

“Whiterun?”

 

Yes.

 

“How’d we get from Morthal to Whiterun?”

 

Another yes. Though Castiel’s pleasure only shows faintly on his features, it’s still an improvement his face hardly needs.

 

It’s slim compensation for the way Dean’s stomach clenches. He looks ahead to Sam, who has to be listening.

 

“Simple enough of a story,” Dean makes himself lie. “We were guarding the town up there.” Their father turned from blacksmithing to vampire hunting after their house burned down. Their mother’s ghost lingered until their father put down the vamps who’d done it, and then John had trained them to hunt too.

 

“Once Sam was old enough, he went off to the Mage College up in Winterhold for more formal training.” For any formal training. He’d been smuggling spellbooks into the house for years because their father hadn’t approved. A Nord’s true strength is in his body, not fancy spells or potions; though Dean can’t help but agree, he’s not about to say no to a couple enchantments on his armor either. But that compromise between father and brother came later.

 

“About, fuck, a decade ago, Jarl Henriksen was visiting up north. I caught his eye, and he poached me for Whiterun.” Dean had been a free agent, not a guard, and the visiting jarl had appreciated Dean taking initiative in killing the vampires trying to infiltrate the longhouse.

 

“Couple years back, the jarl wanted a new wizard after the old one went to the nasty side of conjuration. I mentioned Sam’s thing for enchanting, and we called him down from the College. Simple as that.”

 

Up ahead, Sam snorts. “You left out the part where I didn’t know the job offer was sheer nepotism until I got all the way there.”

 

It’s the only missing piece Sam can acknowledge without them hashing out the rest in front of Castiel, and both of them know it.

 

“Jarl hasn’t kicked you out yet,” Dean points out.

 

“Yeah, because I know my stuff.” With that, Sam turns his gaze back ahead.

 

Castiel, however, keeps looking at Dean.

 

“What?” Dean asks.

 

Castiel gestures for more. More what, Dean’s not sure, but it’s definitely a gesture for more.

 

“That’s the story, man,” Dean says, and Cas looks at him like he knows that’s not true. “Now, you want a good story, you ask Sam about the time a Daedric prince challenged him to a drinking contest. _That’s_ a good story.”

 

Castiel’s eyebrows shoot up as Sam groans.

 

“Look, he said his name was Gabriel Guevenne and he looked human at the time, all right?”

 

“Yeah, go pester him about that,” Dean says, and though it’s obvious Castiel knows he’s being dismissed, it is a pretty intriguing story starter, as these things go. It’s a surprisingly good story, for one involving the daedra, with the only real casualties being Sam’s pride and a hagraven someone would have had to kill anyway.

 

Dean figures the amusement will serve Castiel’s grief better than the sob story of their childhood. Still, once Castiel accidentally laughs and sends half a dead tree flying down the hillside into the river… After that, they keep to more serious subjects.

  
  


The sun hangs low by the time they reach the turn toward the switchback trail up the mountain. A stone cairn marks the way, chest high, the crowning rock holding down a flapping piece of cloth for a flag. The path upward is trampled dirt. The path onward is the same poorly kept stone as it has been for miles.

 

“We could press on to Fort Amol,” Sam says. “Stay the night there, double back in the morning.”

 

“Yeah, but is it an Eastmarch fort or a bandit fort right now?” Dean counters. “I say we head up now and camp where we can.” They have enough in the way of oats that they don’t need to let the horses graze tonight, and Dean always has a tarp to cover his armor with against the morning frost. This time of year, he might not even need it.

 

“Cas, what do you think?” Sam asks. “Risk a look at the fort for a warm place to spend the night, or head on up and see if we can find a safe place to camp on the route?”

 

Already looking cold, Castiel unhesitatingly points down the stone road.

 

“How come he gets to pick?” Dean asks Sam. “I’m the safety guy.”

 

“We’re the escorts,” Sam says. “If that’s the way he wants to go to High Hrothgar, that’s the way we go.”

 

Dean fucking hates escort missions.

  
  


They go all the way to Fort Amol without seeing a single guard or soldier in Eastmarch uniform. Based on that alone, Dean orders everyone to stay quiet and low, keeping behind the trees in their lengthening shadows. He takes the lead, pushing Sam back to the rear to keep an eye on Cas’ signals, and no one is allowed to light a torch or cast a spell for light.

 

When the fort comes into sight, Dean peers at it long and hard. Finally, a spot of motion catches his eye. Motion and a light, the illumination too steady to be fire.

 

It’s not bandits, but it’s not soldiers either.

 

“Of course it’s fucking witches,” Dean mutters. He twists in his saddle, turning Baby around by the pressure of his legs. “Anybody want to fight an entire fort of witches before bed?”

 

No one responds, but then, they don’t have to. The witches are too well-defended, and there’s no convenient bridge for Castiel to blast them down from. There might even be a hagraven or two in there, and that is more than a three man job even in a hold where it _is_ Dean’s job.

 

They head back.

  
  


By the time they return to the base of the switchback, a full hour has passed, maybe more. Daylight is fading fast and they still need to make camp. They have maybe an hour more before they’ll be setting things up in the dark, or in the light of Sam’s spells.

 

At the base of the trail, while it’s still a path through the woods instead of a switchback up the mountain, it’s already dark among the trees. Dean keeps his eyes peeled and his mouth shut, fighting down the urge to curse out the other two with him. Only the sure knowledge that they’re doing it to themselves keeps him quiet. That, and his own wariness of the forest.

 

Once the trail turns fully into a switchback, it also gets steep enough that they have to dismount. It’s a long trudge up, longer in heavy armor, but Dean keeps the pace steady no matter how he hears Sam and Castiel huffing and puffing behind him. As they climb above the trees, they at least get more light shining on the side of the cliff.

 

And there, flying in the distance through the deepening twilight, is unmistakably a dragon.

 

It’s off to the northeast, probably circling the snowbound farms by Windhelm by the looks of it. A flash of red shoots down from the sky, and they all stop to look, miles and miles away. Cas shakes it off first, a pained look across his face as he gestures Dean onward. Windhelm has its own soldiers and its own jarl. Dean can’t go defending all of Eastmarch, too.

 

Resuming their climb, they turn one way and back the other, and each time the trail doubles back on itself, Dean takes a look at his traveling companions. Neither of them are looking so hot, especially Cas, who is looking downright cold.

 

If he catches a chill, the guy will probably end up sneezing them right off the cliff.

 

With that in mind, Dean stops them only a few more passes up. This one is practically a sprawling staircase landing compared to their previous hairpin turns. There’s even a rotting wooden fence making sure travelers won’t keep wandering forward, but that’s where Dean goes. “Wait here a minute,” he tells Cas. He doesn’t hand over Baby’s reins—she’s far too proud and has a habit of biting strangers—but she stays put for him.

 

Sword in hand, he checks out the area. On the right, the cliff stretches up, but it’s littered with shrubbery holding the rocks in, and there are no signs of recent rockfall on the ground. There’s a pine doing its best by the left edge, the drop, so the land doesn’t look ready to crumble there, either. Overall, there’s enough space for three horses to get some standing shuteye, and then the three of them can huddle around the rotting fence. Sam can put an ice rune or two on the trail itself, catch anything coming or going that tries to mess with them.

 

As for the dragon in the distance, Dean’s almost sure it landed and hasn’t taken flight again. Whether it’s dead or simply grounded from the weight of eating farmhands, Dean has no way to tell. They’ll simply have to risk being open to the air.

 

Dean nods to himself before sheathing his blade and returning. And staring.

 

With Baby and Connie blocking Sam and Charger below, it’s still just Castiel in front of him, but it’s.

 

It’s like a different guy.

 

Helmet off, hair sticking up with wind and sweat. Golden sunset light tinting the outline of his face. His eyes on the land spread out below them to the north, the land stretching down and far and _farther_ with trees and water concealing the harsh rock beneath. His mouth is as pink as the sun-kissed clouds peeking around the side of the mountain. His eyes are as blue as the sky above as it glimmers into hints of stars.

 

But most tellingly of all, he’s stroking Baby’s neck, and she’s letting him.

 

Dean clears his throat. “Yeah, here.”

 

They make camp. They herd the horses against the plant-strewn rockface and Dean ties a rope from rockface to tree to the edge of the rotting fence in the hopes that it’ll serve as a functional boundary. Just to be on the safe side, he piles their saddles and bags as a secondary boundary. Cas joins in, but clearly doesn’t understand why Baby is abruptly trying to smother him with affection.

 

“You’ve got the oat sack in there,” Dean explains while Sam laughs.

 

“They’re basically the same animal, Baby and Dean,” Sam tells Cas. “The only thing they love more than each other is food.”

 

“Shut up, bitch. And pull out that coat you enchanted against cold, Cas needs it already.”

 

“Really?” Sam asks. “It’s not that cold.”

 

“Yeah, for _Nords_ , dumbass, not for thin-skinned little Bretons.”

 

Castiel gives him a stinkeye for that, but he accepts the coat gratefully. Wrapping it around himself, he turns to the side to sigh out his relief. Nothing happens, but Dean’s not gonna fault the guy for being cautious.

 

“I’ve got this scarf, too,” Sam adds, “but that one’s so Dean doesn’t stick to his armor while we’re climbing up through the snow.”

 

“Give him the scarf for now,” Dean says, expertly filling oat bags without letting Baby make him spill. “We can find more layers to pile on him in Ivarstead.”

 

Once the horses are fed, the people get their turn too. Dean eats standing, because once he sits down, he’ll stay down for the night, he’s sure. They roll out their bedrolls once the horses are settled, and Sam casts the ice runes on the path, enough to make a lot of noise and pain should anything step there. The lines of magic glow faintly in the darkening night, but not as brightly as the balls of magelight hanging over Sam and Cas’ heads. Eventually, those hovering lights fade, and Dean has a quiet moment of pride to note that Sam’s light lasts the longest.

 

They bunk down, Cas closest to the edge. “You gonna sleep facing that way?” Dean asks, and Cas nods. It’s a good safety measure when he could kill them all with a snore.

 

As if expecting further questions, further _something_ , Cas gets up and comes close. He looks up at Dean with his eyebrows raised, as if his question is clear, but Dean’s mind is as blank as a new piece of vellum.

 

“What?” Dean asks, and that’s when Cas puts his gloved hand on Dean’s arm. Dean’s removed his gauntlets for the evening, but no more than that.

 

Dean keeps staring as Cas starts to unclasp Dean’s pauldron.

 

“Uh, no, I can sleep with it on,” Dean says, not otherwise stopping him.

 

Cas gestures at all of him.

 

If he takes it off, he’ll be paranoid the entire night. “Just gonna have to put it back on in the morning anyway.”

 

Cas nods like this is a new realization. His chin goes up and doesn’t quite come down, showing Dean his neck and the dark stubble marring the otherwise smooth line of his throat.

 

“Thanks, though.”

 

Sam settles in closest to the cliff face. Dean takes the middle spot. Before bunking down for the night, they all stand behind the rope, close to the edge, and they all piss off it, as far down and out as they can reach. It’s a good moment, but it quickly fades as the night fully descends.

 

With the runes in place on the path, there’s nothing to keep watch against, not unless that dragon is going to descend out of the sky above them. It’s this thought that has Dean lying awake, eyes fixed on the deep blue and steel clouds and magic gleam of stars. The moons make their slow path across the sky, and still Dean lies there sleeplessly, cushioned by his gambeson against his armor, cushioned against the ground by his bedroll. His saddlebag makes a decent enough pillow.

 

Beside him, Cas shifts.

 

In a slightly clanking answer, Dean rolls onto his side.

 

Cas immediately rolls over to face him. The silver light of the moons suits him just as well as the gold of sunset, and that is a bad line of thought for this time of night, lying on the ground with scant feet between them.

 

“Still cold?” Dean whispers. The horses need their saddle blankets, but maybe they could light a small fire. The pine tree wouldn’t be much good, but the rotten fence is a good candidate.

 

With a motion both shrugging and shuffling, Cas edges closer. He looks at Dean under the starlight and Dean looks right back. The mountainside groans and creaks with wind and trees. Dean knows Cas’ breath on his cheek by the warmth of it.

 

Slowly, clearly aiming toward stealth, Cas raises himself up on one arm to look over Dean at Sam. Dry grass crunches faintly under his arm. Just as slowly, Cas lowers himself back down. He points to Sam and indicates sleeping with a gloved hand under his own cheek.

 

Dean nods back.

 

Again, they look at each other. Again, Cas shifts. Still braced on his elbow, he doesn’t lift himself up very far. Just enough to be a touch higher than Dean where he lies with his head on his saddlebag. A look of intense preparation in the set of his jaw, Cas pulls off his gloves.

 

With his free hand, Cas reaches out slowly, so slowly, a question in his eyes, and touches Dean’s lower lip.

 

Dean nods. He nods a lot, and Cas comes back down, lowers himself to Dean’s level. His lips are cool but his mouth is hot. The taste of him is familiar, a false intimacy brought on by sharing the same dinner. His hands grow warm on Dean’s face, and Dean twists his own chilled fingers through Cas’ already mussed hair. He tugs, seeking to urge Cas to the side, trying to get his mouth on that gorgeous jaw or neck, but Cas’ breath hitches and they freeze.

 

“Don’t you dare moan,” Dean threatens in a whisper.

 

Cas looks at him with a challenge within the shadows his eyes have become.

 

Dean swallows.

 

This time when Cas kisses, he kisses with teeth. It might be better said that he _bites_ , but there is only so much tenderness that word can hold, and Cas exceeds it. Cas bites Dean’s lower lip. He tugs. He pulls and lets it slide free. He scrapes his teeth against Dean’s cheek on the way to his ear, and to have it sucked and nibbled has Dean fisting his hand into his mouth.

 

Just when Dean is really and truly regretting keeping his armor on, Cas pulls back and taps Dean on the mouth with a finger.

 

“Whuh?”

 

Cas taps his lips again before moving his hand lower, stroking his thumb across Dean’s Adam’s apple without choking him. Dean shivers hard, and not from the night air.

 

“I didn’t moan?” he whispers.

 

Cas nods and pulls Dean toward him, the pair of them straining toward each other with their lower bodies still trapped in their bedrolls. As Dean goes on the kissing offensive, Cas leaves his hand on the side of Dean’s neck, probably for the warmth, and Dean reaches up to move Cas’ thumb right where he wants it, right where it’s stupid to want it.

 

Cas’ eyelashes brush Dean’s cheek as Cas blinks. Dean guides him to press, just a little, just enough, a light push over his throat. Cas pauses for all of half a second before trying to climb onto him.

 

Dean shakes his head and pulls Cas down against his side, probably bruising the poor guy’s knees where they hit against Dean’s armor. “Tomorrow,” Dean whispers. “Ivarstead, get an inn room. Put a door between us and Sam, and then we’ll see what you can take without making a noise. That’s it, right? You think you can take whatever I can take, huh?”

 

Cas responds with another biting kiss, hard with his thumb pressing down, and Dean’s toes curl in his boots. He’s so aching hard and he can’t do a thing about it. His hips try to rock inside his armor and that only makes it worse, but Cas clearly sees the motion and sucks in a gasp.

 

Hand still fisted in Cas’ hair, Dean pulls until Cas’ ear is at his mouth. Cas nods along, nodding and nodding and pressing closer, relinquishing his grip on Dean’s neck to press tight at this new angle, but Dean doesn’t lick or suck or kiss or bite.

 

No, Dean lowers his voice and lowers his mouth and he whispers into Cas’ ear, hot and dirty, “I can take it harder than you can. I could ride your fucking dick all night, I could sit in your lap with your cock and seed still inside me until you got hard again, I could _keep fucking riding you_ , and when I got up in the morning, I could ride my horse _all damn day_. Not a wince or a whine. And that night, I’d ride you _again_. Can you do that, Cas?”

 

Breathing heavy, biting his own hand, Cas should be shaking his head. He should be giving in. Instead, under moonlight, flushed with his own inner heat, Cas is bobbing his head _yes_ , he’s bobbing his head like he should be bobbing it over Dean’s cock, with lips tight around Dean’s hot skin instead of his own night-chilled fingers.

 

“You think you can fuck me harder than I can fuck you?” Dean demands in his quietest whisper, sparing a prayer to all Nine Divines that Sam won’t wake up and hear him. “I could fuck you so hard, you’d shout the whole inn down. I could ride you so hard, you’d knock the village down. The whole fucking village, Cas, with my ass tight around your cock, is that what you want?”

 

With a strangled noise caught behind his lips, Cas rips himself away and rolls over. By the hunch of his shoulders, he’s got one hand down his bedroll. By the heaving of his breath, he’s having himself a good ol’ time. Dean reaches out and wraps an arm under Cas’, between arm and side, and he hauls Cas close with a hand on his twitching stomach.

 

Cas’ entire body stiffens, but the wet noises of his hidden hand overshadow any noise that might come from his lungs. Dean can feel the motions through Cas’ arm against his forearm, he can feel the stutter of it in the way Cas slowly starts to breathe again after, but he can’t feel Cas’ back against his chest with steel plate in the way.

 

Dean noses against Cas’ hair until he gets to his ear again. Cas twists against him, seeking, as if he’d be able to truly fondle Dean through the chainmail protecting his crotch.

 

“Can you be that quiet again tomorrow night?” Dean asks. Cas starts nodding immediately. He even tries to roll over before pausing and going stiff in a way that doesn’t speak so much of climax as what comes after. “Dirty bedroll, huh.”

 

Grimacing, Cas shifts around to open one of his own saddlebags. He pulls something out, a piece of off-white that Dean vaguely recognizes as part of Cas’ gag from the night before. Once cleaned up, Cas rolls back and presses a hand to Dean’s chest—before immediately snatching it back from the cold metal. He lowers that hand down to the lip of Dean’s bedroll instead and raises his eyebrows.

 

It’s really tempting. Dean can get himself open, but there’s a fair amount of jangling involved, enough that he’s sure to wake Sam. And despite all of his big talk, he’s not entirely sure he’d be able to climax without making noise.

 

Sighing, Dean shakes his head. “Tomorrow?”

 

Cas nods but still keeps reaching for him, now to Dean’s face. No. His neck.

 

Dean closes his eyes into the kiss. And it is a kiss now, not biting. All the aggression of the bites is now in the thumb over his throat, that ever-present threat, and Dean’s own cavalier attitude that he likes to pretend doesn’t mean trust. The kisses grow deep and slow, as if Cas is both falling asleep and falling into him. Trapped and throbbing in his armor, Dean keeps breathing as steadily as he can, something not helped by the way Cas scratches his fingernails against Dean’s scalp.

 

As their mouths move together, their hands stay steady, Dean with Cas’ shoulder and back, Cas with Dean’s neck and head. Then, slowly, when Dean is almost more relaxed than he is excited, Cas brings his teeth back into play. He presses down, nearing the point of pain, and Dean lets him. He goes past the point of pain, and Dean lets him. He goes so far past the point of pain, his breath hot in Dean’s mouth, that Dean’s cock claims to be harder than the armor imprisoning it.

 

Then Cas presses his thumb down on his throat.

 

Dean stops breathing. He still can. He stops anyway.

 

For too long a moment, Cas is still. It’s long enough a moment that Dean opens his eyes.

 

Cas watches him, intent and half-amazed, unaware of the moons reflected in his eyes. Without closing them, Cas inhales deeply through his nose, as if about to say something. As if about to shout something.

 

Legs bound in his bedroll, arousal trapped in his blood, Dean lies there and does nothing to stop him.

 

Cas presses their lips together and exhales hard into Dean’s mouth. Air, air, air, all through Cas’ lips and into Dean’s lungs, and any vocalization at all could have Dean slamming back into the cliff wall behind him. It could break his teeth and shatter his skull. It could destroy him.

 

He’s never been harder in his life. His entire body thrums. Tingles. Strains. His nipples feel itchy and _tight_ from how turned on he is. He needs them pinched or bitten almost as much as he needs his cock sucked or his ass filled.

 

When the choices narrow down to coming in his armor or going mad, Dean pushes Cas back. Their mouths separate with a slick noise that would sound better around Dean’s dick. Cas keeps his thumb over Dean’s throat.

 

“Go to sleep, you fucking tease,” Dean whispers, louder than he means to.

 

Sam makes a noise.

 

Dean goes very, very still.

 

Cas goes very, very still, except for lifting his thumb.

 

Sam makes another noise before rolling over and shuffling around.

 

Nobody else moves, not even the horses.

 

Long eternities pass. Sam’s breathing resumes its even pace.

 

Dean slowly exhales.

 

Cas slowly exhales.

 

Dean’s dick notices Cas exhaling.

 

Exercising more restraint than an entire dungeon should be equipped with, Dean signals Cas to sleep, putting his hand under his cheek and pointedly closing his eyes. He strains his ears, both listening for Sam to wake and for Cas to obey.

 

Hearing neither, he peeks.

 

Cas is still staring at him, though staring might be too alert a word for his heavy-lidded gaze. First making a vague gesture up the mountain, Cas follows this by sticking his finger into his own mouth. There’s nothing teasing about this. It is not a gesture to excite or tempt, at least no more than the spoken form of that promise would be.

 

Cas wants to suck his dick tomorrow night.

 

Dean shifts, and the resulting noise of his armor has him freezing again. Cas gets the idea, though, and leans in, offering up his ear where his hair just starts to curl over it.

 

“If you can’t moan around my cock, what’s the point?” Dean whispers, unwilling to admit he’s not brave enough to risk it.

 

Cas gestures up the mountain, again and again.

 

“Once you got it under control,” Dean agrees.

 

Cas nods back and kisses him once more. Twice more. Dean’s blood burns hotter under his skin despite the night’s chill, and Cas pulls his gloves back on as they kiss. The slightest pressure against Dean’s chest tells him Cas is touching him.

 

When they part for more useless looking in the moondrenched dark, Dean gestures for Cas to roll over. Cas does, and he doesn’t need a second prompt to scoot back up until his bedroll is up against Dean’s. They’re as close as they would be on a bed, if Cas doesn’t turn out to be a cuddler.

 

Staring at where the line of Cas’ hair turns into the line of Cas’ neck, Dean remembers the amulet that rides, even now, against Cas’ chest.

 

Ivarstead isn’t far from Riften, where the Temple of Mara sits. It isn’t far at all.

 

But that’s a very Nord way of thinking. The life and death and speed of Skyrim in his bones make themselves clear in the heat of his blood and the wants of his mouth. When people are very lucky, there’s time enough to get to know each other after they’re married.

 

Despite the chill of his armor, a chill Dean can feel even through his gambeson, Cas scoots back even further. Cas burrows down into his bedroll, but he makes it clear that Dean’s steel-clad arm is meant to go over his side.

 

They fall asleep like that, and in the morning, Sam doesn’t even say anything about it.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading, everybody, and I'll see you next week.


	3. Quicksave

The highlight of Dean’s morning is not waking up with Cas. Waking up is an aching, stiff-jointed affair only made worse by Baby trying to eat Dean’s hair in the attempt to hurry up her breakfast. Cas is clearly still chilled despite the limited warmth Dean and the bedroll could offer him; the path up to High Hrothgar is going to be even worse.

 

Breakfast isn’t the highlight either, their bread going stale and their meat as salty as ever. Sam knows better than to offer Dean one of his apples while Baby is still nosing around for more than oats, but at least the ale to wash down the jerky’s salt is cold.

 

No, the real highlight of the morning is the juvenile Nord humor that has Cas staring at them in horror.

 

“What?” Dean asks, mid-stream. “Gotta get rid of the runes somehow.”

 

Sam just laughs, proving that he’s not always a wet blanket on the fire.

 

The ice runes Sam had laid down before they slept are still intact in the morning. Nothing’s crossed over them, which means they have to be dispelled before their traveling party can cross the affected area safely. Obviously, they could throw something on the runes to activate the blasts of ice magic, but where’s the fun in that? The daring?

 

At least, that’s the rationale for pissing on them. The runes flash at a solid enough stream. Ice bursts out of the ground in a sharp blast. Yellow crystals of frozen urine roll down the mountainside, and Sam and Dean laugh their fill. It’s a very Nord thing to do, pissing on magic.

 

“You don’t have to go?” Dean asks over his shoulder, shaking himself off. Sam’s taken the uphill runes and Dean has the downhill ones. “Still one rune left.”

 

“The ice magic doesn’t actually travel up the stream,” Sam adds, back to being a spoilsport. “It’s safe, as long as you stand far enough back. You could even do it with a lightning rune. One of my classmates got zapped that way a couple times, but it was always a chained hit, never direct.”

 

“They got lightning to the dick?” Dean asks, because that is a story Sam should have shared sooner.

 

“Not in the dick,” Sam says, rolling his eyes like Dean’s absurd to assume it. “The electricity just bounced off a nearby candelabra and got him in the arm.”

 

“See?” Dean says to Cas with a shit-eating grin. “Totally safe.”

 

Cas looks at them with what might be despair.

 

Dean just keeps on grinning. He’s got a full day ahead of them to talk Cas back into bed.

  
  


Sunrise on the mountainside blinds them on every other pass back and forth up the switchback. When they’re not squinting against the sun or staring down hard at the ground under their feet, it’s breathtaking, the kind of heights Dean’s only really seen on the mountain pass from Morthal down into Whiterun hold. Even then, those icy mountain paths didn’t have this absurd drop to them, didn’t let the eyes look down as the world fell away entirely on one side.

 

Down the path a way, Sam starts talking to Cas about Winterhold, about ice and cliffs and a college standing on a spire of rock where all else had fallen around it. Dean listens in. He doesn’t have any choice but to listen in. It’s all things he knows about the College of Winterhold anyway, though never before from Sam’s mouth.

 

It’s strange to hear.

 

The climb up the switchback takes them until mid-morning. They all groan and sigh, except for Cas, who just starts stretching out his legs. They give themselves and the horses a break before mounting up on the flatter land. Dean sees more than a few signs of bears about, and he points these out to Sam and Cas. Something to watch out for as they go.

 

Almost ironically, it’s a sabre cat they find first. Though the woods are thinner up here than they were down below, there’s still enough tree cover for the giant cat to catch them by surprise. Sam shoots off some magic before Dean can close the distance with his drawn sword, but the sabre cat gives them nearly as good as it gets. If it weren’t for Cas’ magic, Baby would be in rough shape, the limping kind that horses don’t come back from.

 

Cas fixes Baby up over the cooling corpse of the sabre cat, and Dean skins the dead beast with more viciousness than is truly called for, all for the sake of keeping himself out of the way. When Cas pats the side of Baby’s neck and gestures Dean over, Dean’s at Baby’s side in an instant, heavy armor or not. She nuzzles Dean in reassurance before stepping into Cas in an unmistakable horse-hug.

 

“Fuck, man,” is all Dean can manage to say for a long minute. When Baby starts to nose at Dean’s hands, clearly expecting a treat for nearly dying, Dean cracks a laugh before he can crack his heart. “Fuck, Cas,” he says again, pulling the guy in for a hug of his own. “It’s a fine day with you around, you know that, right?”

 

While Dean slowly calms down, Sam takes a moment to sear the remains of the skinned sabre cat. The meat crackles and burns, and they carve out the chunks they care to carry before leaving the rest to rot off the side of the road. Let that draw predators and scavengers away from them. The sabre cat’s flesh is charred where it’s not dripping with juices, but despite it being bland as rocks and just as tough, it’s still a welcome reprieve from their salted meat.

 

Though Baby seems fine now, Dean doesn’t immediately mount up again. He keeps in the front, though, very much aware of his role as the first line of protection between the mages and the wild. He doesn’t dare glance back, trusting Sam to notice if Cas starts signaling.

 

Dean’s paranoia pays off when a bear comes at them, a territorial beast that can’t seem to understand that they don’t give a shit about her cub in the underbrush. Dean makes himself as big as possible with his sword and shield while the she-bear rears up even taller, a prime target for ice and lightning spells. Frozen and roasted in turns, she bats Dean on the shield once before lumbering off after her fleeing cub.

 

Cas is down off his horse in a moment, so quick that Dean’s sure Baby must have somehow gotten hurt again, but Cas comes to Dean, not to Baby.

 

“Barely touched me,” Dean promises, already feeling the strained muscles and growing bruises.

 

Cas rolls his eyes before taking the pain away with golden light. Then he grabs Dean by the horns of his steel helmet and pulls him down for a firm, closed-mouth kiss. Dean only has a second to catch up from being pulled so agreeably off-balance, but—staring at them from horseback—it looks like Sam needs a full minute to do the same.

 

Cas mounts back up with a faintly smug look at Dean, and Dean, not thinking, climbs onto Baby’s saddle. He’s been riding for the better part of a mile before he realizes what’s happened. It was time to mount up anyway, he reasons. Slowing everything down, going on foot. And Baby really does seem to be fine.

 

On their right, the true mountain looms ever higher above the trees. What they’d climbed on the switchback was barely the foothills. As noon passes, the sun itself vanishes behind the mountain, lowering the temperature when it should be at its daily peak.

 

“Cas doing all right?” Dean calls back to Sam, not looking for himself. “Getting nippy again.”

 

“Cas?” Sam checks, and Cas must signal at that. “Yeah, he’s fine for now.”

 

They keep going. And going.

 

By mid-afternoon, Dean hears rushing water. Judging by Baby’s pricked ears, he’s not the only one. All of the horses pick up their pace. They’ve had a spring only once today, and it was a piddling little thing of melted snow coming down from the mountain that the horses had testily clustered around. No, this is a river and a waterfall.

 

The dirt path starts to slope downward. The trees part, and there it is, fresh water, glinting and glimmering with pebbles beneath its surface. The water picks up speed after a shallow fording area, rushing forward after that to fall from massive heights.

 

“Nobody slip,” Dean orders, dismounting.

 

“No kidding,” Sam says, either voicing his own thoughts or reading Cas’ face aloud.

 

By unspoken agreement, they stop at the stony edge of the bank to let the horses drink before crossing. Dean’s on alert facing the river, and Sam keeps looking back the way they’ve come even as he girds his robes. Pulling on Dean’s pauldron, Cas points to something upstream. _Caution_ , he signs, but adds no more.

 

“Don’t know what it is?”

 

Cas shakes his head.

 

Frowning, Dean mounts up and stands tall in his saddle. Peering as hard as he can, he can make out a dip in the hill the river bends around. The road splits before the dip, going both up over hill and down around it, close to the water and below an overhang. The lower path is grown over, disused. It makes the broken grass all the more noticeable where something’s been dragged over it, down into the overhang’s suggestion of a cave.

 

Dean climbs back down from Baby, who snorts at his weight and all this fuss.

 

“Could be mudcrabs,” Dean says, entirely unsure of what to expect in this part of the Rift. He’s not like Sam. This is the farthest he’s ever been from his hold. He’s definitely not like Cas, out in a different country entirely. And Skyrim is a different country, no matter what the Empire and the Thalmor have to say about it.

 

Careful about each step, they ford the river. As Cas steps into the icy water, he lets out a hiss of breath, but despite aiming his face downward, the water doesn’t fly.

 

It _freezes_.

 

They all stop and stare as a plate of ice forms across the surface of the running water. Glinting atop the tiny waves, it breaks in half as it bumps into a log in its journey downstream and off the edge of the cliff.

 

“That wasn’t a spell,” Sam says as they start moving again. “You froze that with your voice.”

 

Cas throws up the hand not holding Connie’s reins, clearly as lost as they are.

 

“What, you were trying to say ‘fuck, that’s cold’ and it came out as ice?” Dean asks, looking back at him as he sloshes through the river. He steps on a wobbling rock and immediately looks where he’s going instead, missing Cas’ answer.

 

“Seems it,” Sam calls ahead on Cas’ behalf. “Cas, can you try it again?”

 

“Let’s get the horses out of the water first,” Dean says. “Don’t want any of us getting frozen in the current.”

 

Once they’ve crossed, there’s the usual amount of dumping water out of boots and Dean wiping down his armor. Baby decides she wants to drink again, so they all wait until she’d had her fill. Ignoring the squelch of his socks, Dean keeps to his feet and stays on the southern side of their group, facing upstream, the way they’re going.

 

Behind him, the mages experiment while trying to keep the horses from panicking. Though not as frightened as the birds bursting out of the trees across the river, Connie is still less than pleased about Cas’ roaring sounds.

 

On the first couple of attempts, the water just goes flying. A few small fish end up flopping on the western shore. On the third try, Cas kneels down, sticks his fingers into the water, and shouts while snatching his hand back. That one works. The ice is smaller than it was the first time, but so was Cas’ dismay at the temperature. That might be linked, or maybe Cas is just getting tired.

 

He tries a few more times, making larger and larger ice plates after each pause for rest, and his voice is an inhuman clash of consonants and vowels. Each time he shouts, his eyes flash an eerie draugr blue. Cas plays around with the sounds, or maybe there are actual words in some language he knows. He lets out a particularly loud one, and a chunk of the river freezes a foot deep. His voice echoes off the mountain before them, and Dean is sure they heard it all the way down in Ivarstead.

 

The thing under the overhang hears him, too, and it is not a mudcrab.

 

“Troll!” Dean shouts, drawing his sword as the thing lumbers out of its lair. It’s the typical mottled brown, its swollen knuckles nearly dragging across the ground despite the creature’s upright posture. Its face is flat and mean, its shoulders spiked with bonespurs and its body sporadically tufted with wiry fur.

 

Shield raised, Dean cuts it off before it can reach the horses or mages. The troll makes the lunging swipes to be expected from its kind, attacking with one cudgel of a fist and another. Its long arms make its fighting reach absurd. Taking the hits hard on his shield, Dean circles to the left, keeping the high ground up the hillside as he gets out of the way for spellcasting. Sam shoots off fire, ever the weakness of trolls, and when the troll decides it would rather go after Sam, Dean slices it along the back. The wound practically closes as soon as Dean makes it, but it’s enough to get the troll’s attention firmly back on himself.

 

Summoned sword in hand, Cas comes running in, the idiot. He doesn’t even grab the high ground, instead staying on the troll’s level, coming at it from the side. He has enough sense to stay outside its reach until there’s an opening—and Dean is very good at shieldbashing openings into existence—but Cas doesn’t close in with his sword.

 

He makes sure Dean is out of the way, and then he shouts. It’s the most articulate Dean’s heard out of him since they killed that dragon, even if it is nonsense: “ _Liz slen NUS!_ ”

 

The troll freezes mid-swing. Literally freezes. It topples down the slope into the river and the ice coating it breaks on the creature’s arm. It gropes around wildly, otherwise locked into position.

 

Swearing, Dean pursues. He keeps on the safer side, away from the flailing, swiping arm, although that doesn’t mean much with an arm that long. He bashes the clawed hand away with his shield before driving the point of his sword down into the troll’s center eye. The free arm thrashes for all of a second, and the rest of the body strains as the ice layer shatters. The scent of troll and troll shit gets worse.

 

After prying his sword free with one booted foot on the troll’s shoulder, Dean stabs down into the chest as well, just to be sure. Years in Morthal taught him well where trolls keep their hearts, and this one is officially dead. The final defecation was a hint.

 

Before Dean can stop to clean his blade, he has to catch up to Cas. Still wielding his summoned blade, Cas troops right on over to the troll’s lair like he knows for a fact it doesn’t have a mate or young. The troll doesn’t, as it turns out, but that’s not the point.

 

Nodding to Dean, Cas drops the spell binding his sword. Quick about it, he comes back up from the hillside alcove, away from the bones of deer and wolves to run a cursory hand over the scratches in Dean’s shield. Much less concerned about that, Dean heads to the troll’s lair himself. Fuck, there’s half a bear in there. A couple gnawed human corpses, too, all in ragged clothing instead of dented armor.

 

Sam being Sam, he does the honors, going down to the human corpses and memorizing what features still remain. One has a belt pouch with nothing distinctive in it, just a potion of Cure Disease that wouldn’t have helped her anyway.

 

“The elf had a silver amethyst ring,” Sam reports from below as Dean leads both their horses over the hill. Sam straightens up, wiping his hands on his robes, and comes up on the south side of the hill. “The Nord just has the pouch. We’ll see if anyone in Ivarstead knows who they were.” It’s the usual identification process. Now that they’ve rejoined the main road, it’s just as likely to be a stranger as a local dead in that ditch, but they can still let someone know.

 

Sam mounts up and they’re off again. Conventional knowledge states main roads are technically safer than dirt switchbacks, but then again, this one had a troll under it, so fuck conventional knowledge. Dean keeps in front. Cas urges Connie forward to ride beside him, keeping on Dean’s shield-hand. Dean likes to think Cas does that on purpose, making sure Dean’s sword-hand is free, but Dean likes to think well of him.

 

“Getting the hang of the shouting thing, huh.” The more Dean sees him in action, the more he understands how Tiber Septim the man became Talos the god. And Cas only has the power of an untrained Dragonborn, three days into his calling.

 

Cas wavers his hand in the air. His expression is less optimistic than that.

 

“Sounded like you had, I don’t know, words? With the troll.”

 

A nod.

 

“That a language?”

 

A firm nod.

 

“Like, a Breton thing?”

 

No.

 

“A mage thing?”

 

Also no. Cas signs for dragon.

 

“Dragon language? Dragons have a language?”

 

A nod.

 

“How in Oblivion’s name do you know that?” Dean asks. It is, he thinks, a very reasonable question, but it makes Cas clam up like nobody’s business. “Cas?”

 

Mouth pressed tight, Cas pulls up on his reins, but Dean follows suit until they’re blocking Sam on Charger behind them.

 

“What’s going on?” Sam asks.

 

“Cas knows how to speak dragon,” Dean says.

 

“Dean, how else did you think the guy was going to translate something called the ‘Dragonstone’?” Sam asks, annoyingly unsurprised. “He can read the markings on the back. It’s just sorting out the map on the front that’s been the hard part. The land has changed since it was carved.”

 

When Sam says it, he makes the explanation sound innocent, but just listening to Sam, Cas looks shifty.

 

“This is about your group,” Dean says. “What are you, a secret dragon watching society?”

 

Cas hesitates long enough for Dean to consider withholding sex. Then Cas shakes his head and mimes shooting a bow.

 

“Dragon _hunting_?” Sam asks, leaning forward on Charger, his eyebrows raised high.

 

Cas nods but lifts a gloved finger to his lips.

 

“Seriously? Who’d be against that?” Dean asks.

 

Cas actually looks around them before putting a finger up alongside each of his ears.

 

“Elves?” Dean asks.

 

“Thalmor,” Sam says, and Cas nods at him. Sam draws his horse up to Cas’ other side, a feat the road is just barely wide enough for. Sam leans in close and whispers, “Are you Dragonguard? One of the Blades?”

 

Cas doesn’t move, which is answer enough.

 

“It’s, Cas, it’s an honor,” Sam says, half a second away from gushing. “I have so many questions.”

 

“Yeah, like what the fuck are we talking about?” Dean demands.

 

Cas drops his reins to wave both hands in a wide, negating gesture. He follows it up with his sign for later, before pointing up the mountain.

 

“Right, sorry,” Sam says. “We shouldn’t talk about it on the road. C’mon.” And he sets off first, keeping a faster pace than before.

 

They ride in awkward silence, but Cas doesn’t try to slip behind Dean again. Maybe that’s just practical; with Sam in the lead, there would be no one to notice Cas signing.

 

“Look, man,” Dean says quietly. “I just want to know that we’re good here. Guy comes out of nowhere with a dragon on his heels, starts saying more dragons are going to follow, that’s something I can’t ignore. Greybeards call for the Dragonborn, can’t ignore that either. Stopping dragons, that’s just the right thing to do. The world’s shit enough as it is without being on fire, too. But secret organizations? Look, I don’t want to go doing one thing under the cover of doing another, all right?”

 

Cas nods along and signals safety. His eyes are earnest, the set of his mouth somewhere between concerned and upset.

 

“Dean, shut up, he’s good,” Sam says over his shoulder.

 

“How good?” Dean asks, ignoring the way Cas’ face fights not to fall.

 

“How much of the White-Gold Concordat do you remember?”

 

“That it sucks,” Dean says openly. Dean’s the kind of Nord who never gave much of a shit about Talos until some political treaty went down and told him he wasn’t allowed to worship the guy anymore. Ever since, Talos is Dean’s fucking _favorite_.

 

“It’s not just Talos-worship that got hunted down,” Sam says. “Let’s say there was a group dedicated to being his bodyguards. Theoretically. The descendants of that group would be hunted down too.”

 

Dean stares at Cas.

 

Cas looks away uncomfortably, like he hasn’t figured out that he just became the most fuckable man in the entire world. Small wonder he doesn’t want to tell anyone, with Thalmor eyes and ears throughout the land, but, _fuck_. Talos’ bodyguards. And probably to all of the Dragonborn Emperors, back before the last of them died out in the Oblivion Crisis. Talos’ bodyguards, who apparently don’t serve the new line of the emperors; the Thalmor and the Empire both must be trying to hunt them down as a rogue threat.

 

Dean’s mind is whirling, but mostly, more pressingly, his dick is hard.

 

He reaches out with his shield hand, and it’s an uncomfortable, off-balance reach on their horses, but Dean has a good saddle. He tugs on Cas as best he can with the edge of his shield. Cas looks at him in confusion but nevertheless accepts Dean’s biting kiss. “Gonna need to figure out what to tell people about you,” Dean says when they part. “Tell the jarl some group hired you as escort, that’s how you wound up with the tablet. Or they pegged you as Dragonborn and never told you or-”

 

The look in Cas’ eyes says it all.

 

“They never told you.”

 

Cas shakes his head.

 

“You think they knew?”

 

Cas shrugs, a strangely limp gesture to hold so much doubt and betrayal.

 

Dean tugs him back in for another kiss, gentler this time. Cas lifts one hand to hold Dean by one of the horns on his helmet. Before they pull back, Dean whispers, “You want me to fuck it better?”

 

Quick about it, Cas turns his head to the side for a laugh. It’s a gorgeous noise, literally full of heat.

 

Sam twists around in his saddle. “What was that?”

 

“Cas just breathed fire,” Dean says, like it’s no big deal. The number of ways Cas could kill him by accident keep mounting up, and all Dean wants to do is mount him too. Talos smite him and Oblivion take him, why didn’t he think to pack lube? They’re never going to find any in a backwater like Ivarstead.

 

Sam stares at them before sighing and turning back to watch the road.

  
  


They reach Ivarstead with a few hours to spare until sunset. As the first order of business, they approach the first guard they see, report that they’ve killed the troll staking out the road, and describe the bodies they found. When they’re thanked for their good deed, no reward is offered. By mutual, unspoken agreement, they keep the dead elf’s ring.

 

They lead their horses up to the farm that doubles as a stable for the inn, and Dean gets a preemptive feeling of dread when he sees the longhouse style of the inn. They all dismount, Sam staying to set up the horses for the night, while Dean takes Cas and their bags inside.

 

Vilemyr Inn has the undeniable benefits of being warm and full of food. The main hall is long with tables lining the sides and an immense hearth filling the center of the room. Those few patrons present and already eating look up as he and Cas pass them, but the bard—a surprising figure in a town like this—doesn’t pause in her singing. The innkeeper’s bar is past the hearth, down to the left in front of barrels and a pile of firewood. There’s a grand total of three rooms for rent that Dean can see, and he can see into them all.

 

Cas catches Dean’s shoulder, his eyes round and his mouth set in an unhappy line too stern to call a pout. He points to the open doorways that do not, in fact, have doors. He looks at Dean as if this is Dean’s fault.

 

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean promises, looking into one of the side rooms as he passes. If they turn the wardrobe or pull its doors open, that could shield the bed from the doorway somewhat. The main thing is, they won’t have to share a room with Sam.

 

“Hello, travelers,” the innkeeper greets as they draw near the bar. “What can we do for you tonight?”

 

“We need a room,” Dean answers. “My brother, too, when he comes in. Separate.” To underscore that point, Dean reaches over and tugs on the leather thong around Cas’ neck, pulling the Amulet of Mara out from under his cuirass.

 

The innkeeper makes an understanding noise even as Cas shoots Dean a look. “We only have the one room,” the innkeeper says in a tone of apology, “but it does have the two beds.”

 

Still straightening the amulet over his leather armor, Cas turns that look on the innkeeper.

 

“I’m sorry, sirs, but that’s what we have. If you want to risk pressing on to Riften, that’s your right, but it’s a hard day’s journey between here and there. I wouldn’t want to arrive in that city after dark, I wouldn’t.”

 

Cas is frowning. He tilts his head at Dean, clearly wondering at the innkeeper’s assumption.

 

The innkeeper starts frowning too. “Something amiss?”

 

“He doesn’t talk,” Dean explains. “What’s the price for the room?”

 

“Well, as there’s three of you, it ought to be thirty septims,” the innkeeper begins, clearly about to do them a favor. “It’s our best room, too, but considering the circumstances, you can have it for twenty, ten per bed. Dinner extra, of course.”

 

Cas keeps frowning.

 

“Tell you what,” Dean says, and he starts haggling. In the end, they get dinner, breakfast, and the room, and the innkeeper gets the sabre cat pelt. It would be worth more than the food and lodging if Dean bothered to have it tanned, but for a blanket of fur Dean stripped off a beast that morning, it’s not a bad deal.

 

Sam comes in before they head to their room. Cas responds by grabbing his own saddlebags and bringing them to the door-less room, presumably to claim the bed Dean can’t see through the open doorway. Hefting his own bags, Dean nods the way and Sam follows.

 

Inside the room, there’s two beds against the opposite wall and a table against the near one. Deciding to be frank about it, Dean dumps his saddlebags next to Cas’ at the foot of the far bed. “I’m going to check on how they’re treating Baby,” Dean announces, dropping his gauntlets onto his bags. “You two talk mage stuff or whatever.”

 

It turns out that they’re treating Baby fine. Baby, on the other hand, is not treating them fine. So Dean takes care of her himself, the way it should be. He brushes her down and checks her hooves. He fastens her blanket just so. He rubs at her ears and coos to her until she’s appeased. Only once his duty is done does he return inside.

 

In the long hall of the inn, Cas and Sam are seated at the table closest to their room. They’ve bread and meat and some kind of soup, and though Sam seems to be getting a halfway decent conversation out of Cas, both Cas and Sam slide apart on the bench when Dean’s clanking footsteps grow near. It’s nearly too high a bench to step over in this armor, but Dean makes it. The innkeeper brings Dean his dinner as well with a cheerful comment about close families, but he leaves them as quickly as he came.

 

“So here’s the thing,” Dean says quietly, leaning into Sam’s space. “With Cas up to High Hrothgar with the stone tomorrow, we don’t know when you’re going to get another chance to study it, right? So you should do that tonight. Grab a table, get an ale, do the whole nerd thing.”

 

Sam looks him dead in the eyes and says, “You want me out of the room so you and Cas can fuck.”

 

“Yes,” Dean says. “Yes, I do.”

 

Sam’s gaze flicks past Dean to Cas. Dean doesn’t dare look, but whatever Sam sees on Cas’ face has him nodding. “What’ll you give me?”

 

“Whatever coin you need to get the bard to keep playing. Loud as she can. Tell her it helps with your concentration.”

 

“That’s paying your own expenses. Let’s say… Next time we fight about what to do next, I win. Or maybe not next time, just a fight of my choosing, I get to pull out that win. Deal?”

 

Dean looks at Cas.

 

Cas looks back. He puts his hand high on Dean’s armored thigh, right where the cuisse gives way to chainmail.

 

Dean groans, and not lustily. “Fine,” he says to Sam. “You get to win, but you still have to listen to me first. Deal?”

 

“Deal,” Sam says.

 

Dean wraps his left arm around Cas’ shoulder and brings his mouth close to Cas’ ear, mindful of not hitting the guy with the horns of his helmet. “You’d better be a good lay, is all I’m saying.”

 

Cas breathes in slowly, the inhalation lifting his shoulders and Dean’s arm. He exhales just as slow, his eyes still locked on Dean’s, his fingers edging down between Dean’s thighs.

 

Dean’s mouth goes so dry, his soup might as well be a bowl of sawdust.

 

“Just so we’re clear,” Dean manages to say.

 

Cas’ answering smirk is faint but proud.

  
  


After dinner, they retire to their room. Sam takes the tablet and his writing kit before very pointedly leaving out a pair of potions on the table. With a backwards glance at Dean that is much too worried for Dean’s peace of mind, Sam returns to the main hall.

 

As alone as they’re going to be, Cas lifts Dean’s helm from his head. Dean leans in for a kiss, but Cas pulls away instead to put the horned helmet down on the table and pick up one of the potions. His eyebrows rise at the label.

 

“Cure Disease, right,” Dean says, coming up behind him. He wraps his arms around Cas’ middle, and Cas sinks back against him, nice and easy, even with the armor between them. “I touched the Talos shrine before we left Whiterun yesterday, and I don’t think I caught anything in the woods.” The sabre cat had been the worst of it, but while he’d been banged up, he hadn’t been bitten or clawed through to the skin.

 

Nodding, Cas uncorks the vial and downs it, his head tilting back against Dean’s shoulder. He sets the empty glass on the table before turning within the circle of Dean’s arms. He lifts his chin, strong and proud and showing off his neck and stubble. Dean kisses him where his jaw becomes his throat, but though Cas tilts his head for more, he eases Dean back with his hands at the same time.

 

“What?” Dean asks. “We’ll douse the lights and do what we can under the furs. No one will see.”

 

Shaking his head, Cas touches his Amulet of Mara, its wide circles still openly displayed on his chest.

 

“Got us a discount, didn’t it?” Dean says, forcing a grin.

 

Cas keeps looking at him, a frown growing. He gestures toward the door, then motions beyond that.

 

Dean frowns back.

 

Cas exhales and turns his face away before mouthing _innkeeper_. When nothing goes flying or catches on fire, Cas adds, _He asked about Riften_. At least, Dean assumes this is what Cas adds. The sun had fully set during dinner, and now the only light in the room is that from the hall and the goat horn chandelier hanging above them.

 

“That’s where Skyrim’s only Temple of Mara is,” Dean explains. “That’s where we’d be heading, if we really were engaged.”

 

At that, Cas’ hand flies up, covering the largest chunk of the amulet. His eyes go wide, and Dean tries to play it off like the rejection doesn’t sting.

 

“Plus, I mean,” Dean says, looking for something else to mean, “it’s not like a lot of people are passing through on their way to High Hrothgar, right? Mostly Riften traffic, if any traffic at all. Maybe some for the lumber mill, but I can’t imagine much, the roads like they are.”

 

Nodding with Dean’s explanations, Cas still pulls off the amulet and sets it on the table beside Dean’s discarded helmet. Cas looks tentatively toward the bed, and it’s so unlike the typical unrelenting force of him.

 

Disappointment churns in Dean’s gut, or maybe that’s just the cabbage apple soup. “Should I tell Sam not to bother?” he makes himself ask. “I mean, we’re still gonna have to share a bed, ‘cause there’s no way Sam can fold up in that thing with room to spare. But.”

 

Shaking his head, Cas tugs on Dean’s armor, turning Dean to where Cas can get at the clasps fastening him inside. Cas works steadily, his hands sure, and Dean’s heartbeat begins to calm, secure in the fact that Cas wants him at least this much.

 

“Just like the night we met,” Dean muses as Cas lowers the breastplate to the floor. It’s an odd way of saying _two days ago_ , but there they are. Skyrim moves fast.

 

Cas, on the other hand, moves slow. He undresses Dean one piece of armor at a time, one buckle and clasp at a time. He doesn’t fumble. He never backtracks, instead removing everything in the proper order. He catches at Dean’s hand when Dean tries to help him, tries to speed this up, and he squeezes Dean’s fingers, gently chiding. He urges Dean to sit on the lone chair by the table. He kneels without shame to remove Dean’s greaves and boots. The effect is at once calm and trembling, to be so quietly, intently cared for.

 

Once Dean is down to his gambeson, he thinks to take over the task of undressing himself, but Cas insists here as well. He loosens strings and unhooks buttons. It feels worshipful, as if it is Dean and not Cas who can absorb the souls of legendary beasts. This is, Dean realizes, another way Cas has begun to talk with his hands.

 

“Let me,” Dean says, reaching for Cas in turn, but Cas shakes his head and bids Dean still once more. Layer after layer is stripped away, down to where Dean is sweaty and rank in his smallclothes and Amulet of Stendarr, standing barefoot on the cold flagstones of the inn’s floor. From the main hall, he can hear a lute playing Ragnar the Red, but the sound is muffled over the pounding in his own ears.

 

“Now you,” Dean says, but Cas shakes his head. He takes Dean by the hand to pull him out of the chair and over to the cauldron of a washbasin. The water is clean but cold, the cloth clean but rough. Following in their wake, Cas’ mouth is filthy and hot. Across Dean’s shoulders. His back. His chest. Every line pressed into his body by the weight of his armor, Cas washes and kisses, anointing him with water and affection.

 

Closing his eyes with a sigh, Dean keeps Cas close. A hand in his hair. A touch on his shoulder. A murmur of “Harder” when Cas’ teeth discover Dean’s nipple.

 

It’s difficult to stand through. It’s nearly impossible to endure. This isn’t the romping fuck Dean was looking forward to all day. It’s more than that, and terrifying in a way that even Dean’s dick isn’t sure it likes.

 

“What’s in your head, Cas?” Dean asks, pulling Cas back by the hair.

 

Once again kneeling shamelessly at Dean’s feet, Cas looks up at him with a faint frown, strangely wistful. He brings the washcloth back up between Dean’s thighs, a touch Dean would normally spread his legs for, standing or not.

 

“No, really,” Dean says.

 

Cas makes his gesture for later.

 

“No, now. You’re freaking me out here.”

 

It’s a pretty sight, Cas in leather armor kneeling at his feet, but it’s not a reassuring one. Dean pulls at Cas until he stands. “Seriously, what?”

 

Again, the gesture for later, his expression changed.

 

“Now,” Dean insists.

 

Looking frustrated, Cas nods, but still gestures for later. He points past Dean, past wall and roof. Toward the mountain.

 

“You’re… thinking about later.”

 

A nod, unflinching.

 

Dean’s stomach clenches as the answer punches him hard in the gut. “You think we’re going to take you up the mountain, leave you there, and that’ll be that? We’ll never see you again?”

 

Eyebrows raised, Cas clearly questions any other alternative. He points again through the wall in a lower, slightly different direction.

 

“Yeah, we have to go back to Whiterun, but any problem that threatens the hold, I go after. And this threatens the hold, Cas.”

 

Shaking his head, Cas pulls Dean down for a kiss. A kiss goodbye.

 

This is a farewell fuck.

 

Dean breaks the kiss, chest heaving. “Get your ass naked,” Dean orders, voice and volume low, his blood threatening to boil with more than lust. “Get naked and under the furs, you’re still mine for tonight.”

 

Cas pulls him down again, harder, the tenderness faded but not gone as he fucks his tongue into Dean’s mouth. He tugs Dean’s hands to his own laces, but he turns their bodies at the same time, trying to put Dean between him and the open doorway.

 

“You want me to hide you?” Dean asks quietly, taunting despite himself. “Don’t want anyone to see the fancy Breton bed a filthy Nord?”

 

Baring his teeth, Cas exhales hard through his nose. He tugs off his bracers, his boots, and he only hops a little at the chill of the floor through his socks. He throws out his arms in challenge, body shouting what his voice cannot. He points hard at Dean, two fingers jabbing across the distance between them toward Dean’s eyes. He gestures sharply down his own front. He points to Dean again, defiance in the set of his jaw.

 

“Only I get to see you?” Dean half-asks, not sure if that’s what Cas is saying or if that’s only what Dean wants him to say.

 

But Cas nods, the jerk of his head as fierce as the blaze in his eyes. He reaches for Dean, but Dean reaches faster. Thrown onto his back, Cas gasps for air, winded by the impact onto straw-padded wood. He recovers quickly, glaring more at the bed than he does Dean. It’s a pretty good bed, as beds go, with a wooden slat on each side to hold the straw in, but Cas looks unimpressed. Cas looks slightly more impressed with the speed Dean pulls Cas’ pants off. Cas bucks up his hips to help, but the time they gain there, they lose in the struggle to free Cas from his cuirass.

 

Sprawled on his back in his smallclothes, Cas is toned and tan and just as remarkably devoid of scars as he was two nights ago. But now his skin is Dean’s to touch, his mouth Dean’s to kiss, his concealed cock Dean’s to suck, and this makes him a creature beyond mere beauty. Cas flushes quickly, nipples pebbled and gooseflesh rising, so Dean does the only courteous thing and covers Cas’ body with his own.

 

Cas grabs at him, pulls at him, tugs him so tight that Dean resists for the fun of it. Cas stops in confusion, brow adorably furrowed, so Dean has no choice but to kiss him hard before whispering, “Try harder.”

 

Eyes bright, Cas tries to roll them. They end up a tangle of grasping limbs and banged knees, Dean still on top, Cas sucking bruises into Dean’s neck. When Dean moans, maybe louder than the lute can conceal, Cas successfully rolls him. Dean lets Cas force him onto his back, lets Cas bully between his thighs so hard he can feel the strain harder in the back of his legs than in the ache of his dick.

 

“Fuck, like that,” Dean praises, trying to pull Cas down tight against him. Instead of putting up a fight, Cas comes down instantly—only to try to roll them back over, wedging himself under Dean.

 

“Cas?”

 

Cas tugs at the furs beneath them, trying to get under one of them as well.

 

“Getting shy?”

 

Cas shoots Dean an incredulous, offended look. He thrusts his forearm in front of Dean’s face, pointing at his gooseflesh.

 

“Oh, right. Hold on.”

 

Climbing out of the bed of a freezing Breton is easier said than done, but Dean does manage with the promise to return with their bedrolls. He heaps both on top of Cas, but before he can slide under them to join him, Cas points up at the goat horn chandelier, then to the rope fastened to the wall that holds it aloft.

 

“Making me do all the work here, huh?”

 

Cas doesn’t even nod at that, the answer too obvious as Dean lowers the chandelier and blows out the candles. Dean’s sure to raise the chandelier back up so Sam doesn’t bump into it in the middle of the night. Sam would definitely walk right into it now that the only light is that coming through the doorway and the few frosted glass panes set high into the outer wall, above the mounted stags’ heads.

 

“There we go, you spoiled brat,” Dean says, climbing back into bed. Having both bedrolls piled atop the fur is far too much heat for Dean, but that’s where Cas is, and Cas isn’t budging. It’s more than hot enough for Dean to shimmy out of his smallclothes, and he presses up against Cas’ front to show him what he’s done.

 

With a sharp inhale, Cas works his hand between them and, fuck, that hand. Cas’ summoned sword must not leave calluses, because his palm is as soft as a tailor’s. It’s broad and strong and skilled and _soft_ , and Cas clearly knows just how good that is. Cas twists his hand so his fingers toy with Dean’s shaft while his palm grinds against the head of Dean’s cock, and it’s so fucking simple, it’s so fucking amazing.

 

Having to hunch down a bit to do it, Cas gets his other hand down low. The curve of his shoulder disappears under fur. His teeth dig into Dean’s clavicle. His left hand works Dean’s cock, but his right, oh, Divines, the right hand has Dean by the balls. Rolling them together. Tightening. Tightening.

 

 _Squeezing_.

 

Biting his lip hard and holding Cas harder, Dean swallows down a desperate noise, his hips jerking and straining. There’s only so long Cas can keep doing it, lying on his arm against barely cushioned wood, but gods, while it lasts. Pulling at Cas’ hair, Dean gets Cas’ lips off his skin and against his own.

 

“Show me what you want,” Dean gasps against his mouth. “Show me, I can, show me-”

 

Cas presses a single finger up behind his balls.

 

All of Dean’s body focuses, freezes without freezing, melts without melting, still moving, still solid, and yet, and yet. All of him, on that one touch.

 

“No,” Dean says, voice rough against Cas’ soft lips. “That’s for next time.”

 

Eyes wide, Cas pulls back. A string of saliva stretches between their mouths before falling to the fur beneath them.

 

“You heard me,” Dean whispers, wondering how well Cas can see him in the near dark. “You wanna fuck me, you gotta come back. You want my ass milking your cock until you’re aching with how hard I’m coming ‘round you, you come back.”

 

Biting his lip, Cas exhales hard through his nose, hard enough for Dean to feel the air as well as taste it.

 

“You want to miss out on that, that’s your own fault,” Dean tells him. “‘Cause I’m right here.”

 

What Cas gives him is not a kiss. It has lips and teeth and tongue, but it is not a kiss. It is a savage apology, fierce and fiery and devoid of satisfaction. Cas presses up against him, into him, his smallclothes tented over his erection beneath the furs and bedrolls, and the heat of him burns. The heat of him sears and scalds, and Dean is a man meant for the cold.

 

“Fuck you,” Dean gasps into Cas’ mouth, but Cas just nods. Nods and keeps nodding, pulling at Dean’s hip, fingertips in the dimple of his ass. Their bodies rut together, Cas’ smallclothes just one more infuriating barrier between them. Dean reaches down, fumbles there. He’s fumbling everywhere. Everything with Cas, all fumbling.

 

They strain together, Cas lifting his body as Dean tries to walk the smallclothes down his hips. Dean gets them down as far as the curve of Cas’ ass before Cas grabs at Dean’s right hand and pushes Dean’s fingers against the pucker of his hole.

 

“Nope,” Dean says and Cas fucking _bites_ him. Bites him on the shoulder, so sharp and sudden Dean can’t help but laugh. Dean pulls his hand away from Cas’ ass to yank at his hair instead, and Cas glares at him, pissed and horny to the point where Dean laughs again.

 

“No lube,” Dean explains. “I can take a pounding on spit alone, but your delicate ass? I’d wreck your hole, Cas.”

 

Cas nods in clear challenge.

 

Knowing Cas wants it, Dean can’t help but deny him. “No asses until you come back.”

 

Cas glares at him hard and long and then, without any warning, he rolls over. He turns his back, shoulders hunched beneath the layers piled atop him. Like that’s it. Like it’s over already.

 

Despite the bedrolls and his Nord blood, Dean turns cold.

 

The bedrolls rustle. Cas’ shoulders move, and his arms with them, the full extent of their motions concealed.

 

“Are you _jerking off?_ ” Dean demands.

 

Cas looks over his shoulder as if Dean is the stupidest man in all of Tamriel. He nods Dean forward.

 

Frowning but unable to resist, Dean complies, scooting and shifting forward deeper into Cas’ nest of warmth. He tries to loop an arm around Cas’ chest, but Cas’ is already reaching back for him and they just get in each other’s way. Finally, giving up on guessing, Dean just stays still on his left side, staring at the wall and the back of Cas’ head.

 

Cas’ hand wraps around Dean’s dick, which is nice. Cas scoots back toward him, which is also nice. And then Cas leans forward a little and lifts his leg ever-so-slightly and this turns out to be the nicest thing of all. With his legs still bound in his smallclothes, Cas’ thick thighs press together so tightly as Dean feeds his cock between them. Cas starts nodding again and doesn’t stop, not even once Dean is flush against his back, flush between his legs, flushed everywhere with the searing heat of Cas’ bed and body. Cas brings his right hand down from his front, reaching down between his legs to guide Dean’s cock at the angle he wants it, an angle that knocks the head of Dean’s dick against Cas’ balls.

 

Dean pulls back only long enough to lick his own hand and slick himself up as best he can. He pushes back between those muscular thighs, gasping at the texture of soft skin beneath wiry hair, the path eased by spit and sweat and his own precome. He wraps his arm around Cas’ middle. He gets the other arm half-under Cas’ head, holding onto him in these futile ways as he fucks into him.

 

“Cas,” he groans. “Push ‘em tighter. Push ‘em, oh, fuck, like that. Like that, Cas.”

 

Cas drags Dean’s hand up to his mouth to lick, then down to his cock to stroke, and Dean grabs him eagerly.

 

“Show me.” He grunts between thrusts, beyond caring about how far the sound might carry. He’d warned the innkeeper, everyone here knew what they were getting into tonight. “Make me touch you like you touch you.”

 

Cas shakes his head, squeezing his hand tight around Dean’s on his cock before letting go entirely. That hand goes to the wall to brace himself, the other staying between this thighs, beneath Dean’s thrusting cock.

 

“I got rough hands,” Dean warns, already working him, thumbing the foreskin away from the leaking head. “Got hands so rough, they could make you cry.” He plays with the slit, making Cas twitch and grasp at his arm. “That what you want? You want me to rub you raw? You want it to fucking hurt, me fucking you?”

 

And Cas, the idiot, the lunatic, he starts nodding again.

 

“Warned you,” Dean reminds him, and he gives it to Cas exactly the way he likes it himself. Almost exactly. He has to use his forearm as best he can to keep Cas’ ass pinned where he can thrust under it. Where spit has dried, the sweat of their skin and drip of their dicks now slicks the way. He snaps his hips into Cas again and again, driving them across the bed. Hay bunches beneath the fur under them. The wooden joints of the bed creak. Its feet scrape against stone, and still Dean keeps fucking into him.

 

It’s good, but it’s not good enough. They’re close, but they’re not close enough. It doesn’t matter how tight Cas’ thighs are pressed together when Cas’ back won’t stay pressed to Dean’s chest.

 

With a muffled groan, Cas _shoves_ at the wall, shoves Dean back with his own weight, and then stops shoving entirely. Instead, Cas whips his hand back under their sweltering layers. He pulls Dean’s hand off his dick and up to his chest, pulls at Dean until Dean pulls at Cas in return, pinning Cas against his chest even as his thrusts refuse to abate. Again nodding, nodding, nodding, Cas jerks himself with both hands, one still guiding Dean’s cock into the crease at the apex of his thighs.

 

Sucking on the back of his neck, Dean holds him as tight as he can. He grinds his chest against Cas’ back as much as he does his cock between those thighs. Fuck, but his nipples need pinching. He pinches Cas’ instead, and Cas gasps in a way that could be dangerous.

 

“You’re gonna come for me,” Dean tells him, because he needs that. Needs this. Needs Cas. “You’re gonna come for me so hard, this wall’s gonna fall down.”

 

Twisting, straining, Cas switches up his hands to drag one of Dean’s into his mouth. He sucks hard on Dean’s fingers, practically gagging himself, and when Cas comes, Dean could swear it’s flame, not a tongue, that licks at his fingers.

 

Overcome at the thought, he presses Cas forward, presses him down, still thrusting, thrusting, thrusting while Cas takes it on his stomach, cock trapped between belly and fur. He must be twitching with overstimulation, but Cas fucking _takes_ it until there’s nothing left to take. Dean’s climax empties out of him, into Cas, and that’s it, that’s done, Dean is dead and Cas has taken his soul too.

 

Dean lies there, being dead. Being warm and dead. Hot and dead. Sticky and sweltering and maybe at least a little bit alive, what with his heaving chest still pressing Cas down into fur-covered straw.

 

He gropes around down below a little and is spitefully pleased to find Cas’ smallclothes so damp. He means to bite the back of Cas’ neck again, but he just ends up kissing the guy instead. Cas tries to shift his legs, maybe to let Dean lie between them, but he’s still pinned by his own clothing.

 

“All that,” Dean says quietly, “and you’re still not even naked. I told you to get naked.”

 

Cas snorts into the crook of his own arm.

 

There’s not much space for motion beneath the settled bedrolls, but Dean spanks him anyway.

 

Entirely unimpressed, Cas looks over his shoulder.

 

“That was a warning shot,” Dean explains.

 

Blithely unconcerned, Cas goes back to pillowing his head on his arms. His forearms really are gorgeous, even as they start to pebble with gooseflesh again. Before long, Cas pulls them back under the bedrolls, and that’s about as long as it takes for Dean to start overheating.

 

He pulls away with a groan, and Cas reaches after him with a frown.

 

“What, you want to spend the night sticky?”

 

Cas makes no answer in either direction, but he does let his eyes roam over Dean, standing fully naked within sight of the open doorway. Within sight of the bar, actually, but there’s a sizable keg on the bar that should keep the barkeep from getting an eyeful. And if someone does get an eyeful, well, they’re Nords. If it bothered them that much, they’d bother to put in more doors.

 

Though the relative cold outside of Cas’ personal furnace pile is rapidly making Dean less impressive than he’d prefer, Dean doesn’t cover up. He strides confidently to where Cas left the washcloth, dampens it, cleans himself, and rinses the cloth, dampening it a second time. That done, he returns to the bed where Cas eyes the wet cloth as if it’s as dangerous as live steel.

 

Dean rolls his eyes and climbs back into the heat pile. He lies on his back, the washcloth leeching the warmth from his chest until it’s probably an acceptable temperature, even for wussy little Breton mages. Dean is way too nice, especially to a guy who’s not sticking around.

 

They wash Cas off together, and at the end, Cas does manage to get fully undressed. They drop the washcloth off the side of the bed before sticking Cas’ smallclothes beside Dean’s at the foot of the bed, where they will serve as a solid warning to Sam not to look too closely. Cas rolls back over to face the wall, a safety precaution that has nothing to do with snuggling, and Dean manages to survive the night by sticking his bare feet—and most of his legs—out from beneath the fur pile.

 

As nights go, it’s stifling and awful, and Dean wants a thousand more.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: "It's a fine day with you around" is dialogue an NPC will use when they're willing to marry you. 
> 
> To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading, everybody, and I'll see you next week!


	4. Load

In the morning, they wrap Cas up in every spare piece of clothing they have, and the guy’s still probably going to freeze to death. He’s got his Amulet of Mara back on, under his cuirass, and Dean pretends not to care. They’ve got bigger concerns, like climbing the Throat of the World, or at least the bit of it between them and High Hrothgar.

 

“At least there’s an actual path,” Sam says as they head across the bridge to the first of many shrines leading the way up the fabled seven thousand steps.

 

“Yeah, nothing like broken stone covered in ice,” Dean says.

 

Wearing two pairs of gloves, Sam’s spare robe over his cuirass, a fur hat, and a scarf enchanted against the frost, Cas doesn’t need to say anything to make his opinions known. The way he immediately seeks out a viable walking stick is answer enough.

 

“It’ll be better once the sun’s a little higher,” Sam promises Cas, adjusting the straps of his pack. They’re carrying only the essentials up here, not that they came with much more than that. Sam’s writing kit and copy of the Dragonstone’s map are in their saddlebags, back in the stables with the horses.

 

Dean moderately trusts the elderly stablehand. He mostly trusts the town guards, increasingly so since they’ve let themselves be known as Jarl Henriksen’s knight captain and court wizard. The only one he trusts completely is Baby, which is why their belongings go in the front of her stall, right where she’d trample anyone trying to touch them. He’d been sure to warn the stablehands about that, for their safety as much as the security of their stuff.

 

With their stomachs still warm from breakfast and the sun shining on them from the east, they start up the stairs. These are, for the most part, huge slabs of rock that have been set into the hillside, some like stepping stones across a river of dirt, some positioned closely enough to be a real staircase. Some are still sturdy. Some wobble underfoot, and some are almost entirely buried in erosion. Interspersed between them are unworked hunks of stone the original builders hadn’t bothered to shape or remove.

 

“Well, that’s like fifty down,” Dean says. “Six thousand nine hundred something to go.”

 

Before they reach the snowline, Dean’s ears begin to pop. The trees transition fully to pine, and the little underbrush there is, is scraggly and sparse. Dean thinks he recognizes snowberries, but he’s not stupid enough to pop some in his mouth to check. Sam is sure enough to do it, though, so Dean figures it must be safe.

 

“Go on, Cas,” Sam says, offering some to him as well. “They help with the cold. Not as well as they do distilled, but mix it with some Frost Mirrim or purple mountain flowers, and you’re doing better.”

 

Face twisting against the bitterness, Cas chews them with the same grim determination he uses to climb the stairs. Up they go, the sun shining on them, glinting off the snow to blind them, melting just enough snow to make ice for them when they come back down.

 

It’s the coming back down part that Dean’s steadfastly not thinking about, the journey back when it’ll just be him and Sam.

 

Naturally, Sam has to yammer on about a related subject.

 

“How fast do you think they’ll be able to teach you to get your Shout under control?” Sam asks Cas. “It’s supposed to take regular Nords years to learn how to do just one. I’ve never heard of someone having to learn how to _stop_.”

 

Cas just shrugs and shakes his head. Walking between Sam and Dean on the upward trail, he only looks at Sam. The walking stick in his right hand feels like a barrier between him and Dean, and maybe it is. Maybe he started to pull away the second he put his clothes on this morning.

 

“So I’m thinking,” Sam continues, “while you’re getting trained up, there’s still something we can do. We have a copy of that map now.”

 

“What, you want to run off and hunt dragons now?” Dean asks Sam, looking across Cas instead of at him. Two can play at that game. “That’s not our job, Sam.”

 

“No, but-”

 

Cas slaps his own chest, hard, finally looking at Dean.

 

“What, it’s your job?”

 

An emphatic nod.

 

“Someone’s taking to the whole Dragonborn thing well,” Dean remarks, ignoring the tension around Cas’ eyes.

 

“It’s because he’s a Blade,” Sam says, and Cas nods again. This far up the mountain, he doesn’t bother shushing anyone. “They’ve been hunting dragons since the First Era, Dean.”

 

“Maybe, but until earlier this week, the Fourth Era was pretty much a dragon-free zone.”

 

Cas taps Sam on the arm and gestures for him to continue.

 

“Right, my plan,” Sam says. “I was thinking, I can figure out the general area of each of the dragon burial mounds on the map, and then we can report them to the jarl of each hold. This isn’t something we’re going to be able to handle on our own, and people should know if they’re living on top of a dragon that’s about to come back to life.”

 

“Why _are_ they coming back to life, anyway?” Dean asks.

 

“The inscription Cas translated on the stone said the mounds are where the dragon lords would rest until revived by the power of something called ‘the World Eater,’” Sam says.

 

Cas signals for dragon.

 

“The World Eater’s a dragon?”

 

Cas nods.

 

“So, what, you guys just… missed one?” Dean asks. “There’s a dragon that can bring other dragons back to life, and after four entire eras of hunting dragons, _that’s_ the one you miss?” What are the odds it was the one they saw circling off toward Windhelm? Probably not, which means a _minimum_ of two dragons out there.

 

Cas makes a weighing gesture, looking up ahead rather than at Dean. Finally, a rueful pull to his mouth, he nods.

 

“I’m getting the feeling it’s a little more complex than that,” Sam says.

 

Cas nods again, but he doesn’t deny the basic fact.

 

“Even if it is your job, you’re still going to be up here until who knows when, getting your shit under control,” Dean says. “You got a better idea than Sam’s thing, O Hunter of Dragons?”

 

Again, Cas slaps his own chest.

 

“What, it has to be you?” Dean asks. “Really?”

 

Without any trace of arrogance or irony, Cas nods. He tugs on the strap of Sam’s bag.

 

“What?” Sam asks, nevertheless letting Cas rummage through the bag he’s still carrying. Cas has to juggle his walking stick and it makes the climb a bit awkward, but Cas pulls out his apparent prize.

 

“A soul gem,” Dean says blankly.

 

Nodding, Cas holds the fancy piece of rock to his chest. He taps it against himself insistently, looking at Dean as if this is meant to explain something. It’s just a tiny hunk of crystal that can hold captured animal souls for spellwork, nothing special.

 

“You’re like a soul gem?” Sam asks, and Cas immediately nods.

 

Switching the soul gem into the same hand as his walking stick, Cas signs for dragons before pointing back to the soul gem and then himself.

 

“A soul gem for _dragons_?” Sam asks, really getting his nerd on now. “I mean, the greater the creature, the greater the soul gem you need to capture it, so for a dragon, I’d think-” He cuts himself off. “But Cas, capturing sentient souls, that’s dark stuff.”

 

“Literally,” Dean adds. It’s basically the one thing he knows on the subject, and thus his only joke.

 

“A black soul gem, the side effects you can get just from handling them… There’s a reason they’re illegal, and not just because you have to fill them by murdering people. What’s absorbing dragon souls going to do to you?”

 

Wordlessly, Cas opens his mouth and gestures.

 

“That,” Dean agrees.

 

“But that’s just one,” Sam says. “Just one is more power than you can control. Why do you need more?”

 

Cas shakes his head.

 

“What?” Sam asks. “Don’t tell me this is controlling it.”

 

Cas keeps shaking his head.

 

“No, I don’t think he needs more,” Dean says, and Cas points at him. “Okay, if you don’t need the souls for you, what do you need the souls for?”

 

The path turns around the mountain, circling it, and some of those circles lead them downhill before climbing back up. Going down another immense stairway of stone slabs set into frozen soil, Cas hands his walking stick and the soul gem to Sam to better answer. He holds out his left hand in a fist while motioning for dragon with his right, miming a breath of fire out from his mouth to his hand. As his right hand reaches his left fist, he unfurls the gloved fist in a second fire motion.

 

“Dragon makes dragon,” Dean says.

 

Cas makes a wavering motion with his hand.

 

“Dragon revives dragon,” Sam says, and Cas points to him.

 

Next, Cas takes his right hand and makes a sword gesture across his left, slaying the new dragon. He mimes something rising from the fallen dragon and repeats the motions of one dragon reviving another.

 

Looking at Dean, Cas taps his own chest yet again. He repeats the dragon-slaying gesture, but this time, motions the rising force into his own mouth and swallows. This time, when he makes the dragon reviving motion, his left hand remains a fist, unresponsive.

 

Sam lets out a long breath, a sound much more intimidated than Dean would prefer. “You’re saying if you’re not personally there each time a dragon dies, it can be revived again?”

 

Though Dean prays, actually prays, for the response to be otherwise, Cas nods. Cas doesn’t look terribly happy about it either.

 

“So we burn the bones,” Dean says. “We scatter them and hide them. We line the ribs with iron spikes and see how well they come back to life that way. We do all the shit you do when there’s a rogue necromancer about, and then some.”

 

Something in Cas’ face shifts. In his shoulders, too. He looks at Dean so intently that Dean has to give in to the urge to check past himself, but there’s nothing out there. Literally nothing: just gray skies and a long, icy fall toward the tree line.

 

“What?” Dean asks.

 

Cas shakes his head, shakes himself as they descend the stone stairs—and promptly slips.

 

Sam and Dean catch him in unison, each with a hand shooting out under his armpit or elbow. The uneven hold has him tilting to the side and nearly taking Sam down with him, but the walking stick turns out to be good for something after all.

 

“Maybe you should take this back,” Sam says, passing it over once everyone dusts themselves off. “Mage or not, I’m not much of a staff guy.”

 

Cas accepts it back with a grateful nod.

 

“Mind fixing my scarf?” Dean asks, the enchanted cloth having shifted in the neck hole of his armor in the near-tumble. “I’d do it, but, uh.” His fingers haven’t frozen off within the inner padding of his steel gauntlets, but he’s not about to go and directly touch his neck in these temperatures.

 

Despite shaking his head, Cas reaches up to do it anyway. It’s more of a _what is wrong with you_ kind of head-shaking, the sort even normal people do when they see Dean out in a blizzard and still in his armor. That’s not the important bit, though. The important thing is, even wearing the enchanted gloves under the regular ones, Cas is still leaking heat out his fingers, and it’s awesome.

 

“Thanks, man.”

 

Cas, of course, says nothing, but he does keep adjusting the scarf long after it’s fine, like he’s really that worried about Dean freezing to death. Cas’ lips are more purple than pink, which is much more worrisome.

 

“You gonna be all right?”

 

Looking Dean up and down in all his metal-clad glory, Cas does a good job in calling Dean a hypocritical idiot while only using his eyeballs.

 

“Shut up,” Dean says, trudging after Sam across stone and over snow. The path turns back up again.

 

“Neither of us said anything,” Sam says.

 

“I don’t care, shut up.”

 

Following, Cas just snorts.

  
  


Two ice wraiths and a fucking _frost troll_ later, the elements of the world are rock and ice, wind and snow. Nothing more. There’s no cover from the wind. Even the overhang the frost troll was using as a lair is part of a greater crevasse, tunneling the biting air through even faster.

 

The kicker is, the sun is almost directly overhead. With the distance they’ve managed to climb since sunrise, the sun ought to be inches overhead, but instead it hangs high above, offering less heat than a torchbug in a jar in the rare moments it peeks through the clouds and battering snow.

 

Cas is doing about as well as Dean’s armor, which is to say, they’re screwed. The weather is one thing, but Dean ended up getting a bit dented with the whole frost troll thing going on. Cas made sure to heal him up right after—and ain’t that a pleasant change from Sam’s potions of great effectiveness and minor palatability—but that doesn’t do a thing for his mobility. He should be able to hammer himself out once he gets his hands on the right tools, but a windswept mountain is far from a forge in more than the geographic sense.

 

And Cas, well. Fuck, but Dean is worried. Sam too. Sam’s always steered clear of fire magic, maybe from Dean’s reaction to it after their house burned down, but the guy’s pulling out the fireballs now, lighting anything ablaze for a quick moment of warmth for Cas to huddle around. There’s not much up here even in the way of scraggly undergrowth, but the troll had burned well enough, fur stinking, fat popping. As he’d stood beside the smoldering corpse, Dean’s armor had steamed, the air itself confused by the clashing temperatures.

 

By unspoken agreement, Sam pulls Dean’s enchanted scarf off for him and sticks it on Cas. The protest that gets is feeble at best. Cas blinks at them in numb confusion, and if his teeth weren’t chattering so hard, odds are he would have forgotten himself and asked aloud where the scarf came from. It takes at least a minute longer for Cas to connect the scarf around him to Dean’s frankly freezing neck.

 

Dean knows because he’s watching.

 

The one guy they’ve got who can permanently kill a dragon, and they’re going to get him killed before he can even get trained up.

 

“C’mon, man, you can do this, we’re almost there.” Dean has no idea if that’s true. They’ve long since stopped counting the steps. Maybe they’re only at four thousand. Maybe somebody lied and the real number is twelve thousand steps. Maybe High Hrothgar is a fucking cave and they missed the entrance hours and miles ago. It’s supposed to be some sort of monastery, or maybe a temple or a castle, but then, dragons are supposed to be extinct and Dragonborn legendary. They’ve seen a couple broken stone columns along with the shrines they’ve passed the entire way up, and the thought that these might be the entire remains of their destination is a fear that Dean can’t shake.

 

Cas keeps shuffling around, hands clamped around his walking stick or maybe frozen to it. Dean’s armor will be the same way if he stops moving. The burn of their muscles can’t keep them warm, but they press forward all the same.

 

“It’s all right, lean on me,” Sam urges. A fresh gust of wind rips the words out of his mouth. Even without the benefit of plate armor to cut down on the windchill for him, Sam’s doing the best out of the three of them. Dean’s almost sure the guy enchanted a pair of long underwear for this climb or something, but they’re long past the point where Dean would mock him for it.

 

They keep trudging. The path swoops again, bringing them back down when they need to be climbing ever higher. It’s the worst walk Dean’s ever been on, and he’s been on foot patrol across the western plains of Whiterun hold, full of wolves, mudcrabs, and bandits.

 

Leaning on Sam, Cas is doing only a little better. Dean tries to slow down for him, but there’s only so slowly he can go before the plates of his armor start to freeze together. He keeps his arms moving by removing his bag and untying his bedroll from it. The roll of furs and leather is damp with snow and cumbersome when manipulated by Dean’s gauntlets, but the rolled portion is still dry, and that’s the side Dean drapes around Cas’ shoulders. With that additional layer, Dean can press on Cas’ back, keep steadying him and pushing him forward without freezing Cas with his gauntlets.

 

Like the idiot he is, Cas looks back at him, nearly throwing off his balance all over again. Even when it’s not noticeably icy, the guy’s sliding.

 

“You healing yourself?” Dean shouts above the wind. “C’mon, don’t get frostbite now.”

 

Nodding, Cas lets go of Sam, holding to his walking stick, Dean cupping his shoulders through the bedroll. Cas lifts his free hand and the golden glow is just as strong around his doubled gloves as it would be around his bare hands. His footsteps might get a little surer, or maybe that’s a side effect of needing to focus for spellwork. Whatever the cause, it’s an improvement.

 

True to form—true to _Cas—_ the moment Cas is done healing himself, he turns that healing hand on Dean and then Sam. Dean’s hands and feet flash from chilled to burning with renewed sensation, and judging by the look on Sam’s face, it’s the same for him.

 

With the casting done, Cas grabs right back on to Sam’s arm.

 

They walk. They slip. They stagger. They keep walking. Howling, the wind beats at them. The snow stings their faces and frosts their eyelashes. The sun starts to sink while they keep climbing.

 

Dean’s stomach twists and growls, the last remains of the snowberries hours gone, but he doesn’t pause, not yet, not until Cas has to or Sam deems it necessary. He’s drenched with sweat beneath the insulating wool of his gambeson, a true mess of competing temperatures from frozen head to sweltering middle to numbing feet. It’s gross and wet and kills his appetite a fortunate amount. That, or the worry does.

 

Around another bend in the mountain path, Dean spies another shrine, this one the biggest they’ve seen so far. Unlike the rest, all small affairs with an etching above an offering place, this one has a statue standing tall over it. The bearded stone figure clasps both hands around the hilt of his blade, its point calmly driven into the serpent he pins with one weighty foot. The stone cloak and beard are as comforting a sight as the make of his winged helmet.

 

Even frozen as he is, Dean lifts a hand to his own helm, making a gesture of respect to Talos, the Dragonborn who became a god.

 

The inscription on this etching is large and reads _For years all silent, the Greybeards spoke one name. Tiber Septim, stripling then, was summoned to Hrothgar. They blessed and named him Dovahkiin._

 

Returning that hand to Cas’ shoulder and squeezing through the bedroll, Dean says, “Hey, look, it’s you.”

 

Cas looks back at him blearily, his eyes glacier-ice blue and his lips not much better.

 

“We’re almost there,” Dean says, hoping, and Cas nods.

 

They make one last turn, the last one Cas likely has in him, and there, rising from the rough stone of the mountain, is the temple fortress of High Hrothgar.

 

“Told you,” Dean says, exchanging a look with Sam.

 

They link arms with Cas and effectively frogmarch him forward. When Cas stumbles, they don’t pause, simply dragging him further. Between the two of them, it’s almost easy. Cas’ walking stick falls, but they successfully keep Dean’s bedroll wrapped around him.

 

High Hrothgar sits on the edge of a cliff on the Throat of the World. The grey stone of its walls and two towers are scarred by time, but strong. A center tower rises up from the last of the seven thousand fabled steps leading up to it. One last staircase, a real one, leads up to an offering chest set at the base of that tower, and then the staircase splits to either side, each path leading up to a sturdy door. Dean and Sam haul Cas up the right side, away from even the sight of the cliffs and long drop on their left.

 

Reaching the door, they redistribute Cas, leaning him onto Sam and the relative safety of his cloth robes, while Dean bangs on the door with the steel of his fist. Deciding they’re expected anyway, Dean grabs the door handle and pushes.

 

To his immense surprise, the door actually opens. Dean keeps pushing, letting Sam haul Cas inside first before he follows. Shoving the door shut behind him, he’s hit with a wall of heat and a mix of jarring familiar smells. It’s the dry smells of a stone building heated by fires. It’s old furs and older men. It’s dust and moss, like someone’s growing mushrooms deeper inside, and not just the frankly on-the-nose pots of dragon’s tongue.

 

Though it’s tempting to remain by the large torches set into the walls beside the doors, they drag Cas through the gloom of the stone entry hall into a much larger chamber, the high ceiling scarcely illuminated by the lit braziers at the feet of the carved columns lining the space. Ahead of them are a half-flight of stairs, leading up to hallways that presumably stretch the full width of Hrothgar, and down those stairs come two men in cowls and old robes.

 

Their beards are grey, the robes and cowls a faded black. Two more men emerge from the gaps between the columns, hinting at passageways Dean cannot see. Their robes are uniform in fabric and design, individualized only in wear and repairs.

 

Dean’s face burns against the faint heat of the room. His fingers blaze and his armor steams. Cas falls to his knees and Sam kneels beside him. Dean stays standing over them, keeping on Cas’ left until one of the robed men approaches, still silent. Then Dean gets right between them, shield ready on his arm, sword still sheathed.

 

“You called for the Dragonborn,” Dean says, standing as strong and tall as he knows how.

 

The closest Greybeard nods to him, the motion as slow and smooth as a turtle’s. “So,” he says in a jarringly normal voice, “a Dragonborn appears, at this moment in the turning of the age.”

 

The three other Greybeards gather around them, old musty men in a semi-circle. Beneath their cowls, their eyes peer out with more interest in Dean than in the pair of mages on their floor.

 

“We answered your summons,” Dean says. “We’re only up here because of you, and now we need your help.”

 

“Sanctuary will of course be offered to the Dragonborn and his companions,” replies the same Greybeard. “But first, let us see if you truly are Dragonborn. Let us taste of your Voice.”

 

“Uh,” says Dean. He looks back at Cas and Sam, but mostly Cas. Eyes closed, his breathing much steadier than his shaking body would suggest, Cas doesn’t respond. “Yeah, no,” Dean says back to the Greybeard. “I’m not the Dragonborn, he is.”

 

As one, every grey cowl in the room turns toward Cas.

 

“...I see,” says the Greybeards’ speaker. “Forgive an old man his assumptions.” He steps around Dean before lowering himself unsteadily into a crouch. He peers into Cas’ face. “You are a Breton, are you not? It has been a long time since I have gazed upon a face of anyone other than my fellow Nords.”

 

Face flushing a painful but encouraging red, Cas opens his eyes at that and nods. He looks up at Dean and raises his eyebrows, a request Dean understands immediately.

 

“He’s been having problems controlling his Voice,” Dean says on his behalf. “Throwing people, making ice, that kind of thing.”

 

“Is that so?” the Greybeard asks, looking at Cas with doubled curiosity. “How many Words of Power have you encountered?”

 

“He reads a lot,” Dean says. “You sure you want him to speak? At you?”

 

“With all respect, Master Greybeard, he threw Dean thirty feet in full armor,” Sam adds.

 

“Even so, I would hear the Dragonborn speak. We all would.”

 

“Cas?” Dean asks.

 

Swallowing thickly, Cas nods, and they haul him back to his feet. The bedroll falls from his shoulders, and Sam stoops to pick it back up and drape it around him. Turning his face away from all those gathered, Greybeards included, Cas lets out a roar of a shout. For him, it has become a minor roar, but a roar nonetheless. Dust and pebbles fly off the stone floor. Coal tumbles from a brazier, trailing sparks and embers. The smoke hanging in the air spins and whirls with the indoor wind.

 

“Dragonborn,” the Greybeard says, a sudden warmth deepening his tone. “It is you.” He reaches for Cas and cups his liver-spotted hands around Cas’ gloved ones. “Welcome to High Hrothgar. I am Master Arngeir. I speak for the Greybeards. As, it seems, this warrior does for you. I would ask you why you decided to answer our summons, but the cause does seem clear. You cannot speak at all without Shouting?”

 

Cas nods his confirmation. Carefully keeping his chin pointed away from Sam and Dean, he tries to respond in a whisper, but even this is enough to blow the cowl off Arngeir’s head. Arngeir’s eyebrows rise as if they, too, are about to be flung from his face.

 

“That,” Arngeir says slowly, “is very peculiar.”

 

“Can you help him?” Sam asks.

 

“It is our duty,” Arngeir replies while the other three nod around them. “Of course. Once he is recovered, we shall train him. Come. We have little to offer you after your journey, but we have not forgotten hospitality on our mountain.”

 

“Thank you,” Sam says, bowing as far as it’s possible while still holding Cas up. “We need to warm him, he’s not made for this weather.”

 

“Few are,” says Arngeir dryly. “Follow me to the kitchen.”

  
  


The kitchen follows the same scheme as the upstairs, which is to say, stone, stone, dust, dark, and more stone. But it is warm near the hearth. They lay out their bedrolls to warm them up, or at least bake out some of the cold and melting snow. Sam helps Cas out of his sodden, borrowed robe, coat, and leather armor before easing him into the driest bedroll. That done, Sam starts unclasping Dean from his armor in turn.

 

One of the Greybeards—he doesn’t offer his name—appears at the kitchen stairs with a number of furs in his arms, one cave bear grey, the other ice wolf white. Still unhooking Dean, Sam thanks him.

 

“If you talk, do you destroy stuff?” Dean has to ask, and the Greybeard nods. Though his face is naturally pinched, there’s almost a twitch of a smile to his lips in his answer. Not smug, though. Amused by the question itself.

 

Curled up half-naked in his bedroll, Cas makes a whimpering sort of groaning noise in the back of his throat, his lips pressed tight.

 

Sam piles the furs on him while Dean takes care of his lower armor. “Will Cas be able to talk normally again?” Sam asks. “Ever?”

 

The Greybeard has no response to that.

 

“You don’t know,” Sam says for him, and the Greybeard nods. “Why are you—sorry if this is personal—why do you do this? You had to do this intentionally, right? Train until you can no longer speak safely.”

 

Again nodding, the Greybeard lays a hand upon his own heart. The motion is gentle. Calm.

 

Serene.

 

“Thank you,” Sam says, clearly finding that answer enough.

 

The Greybeard bows shallowly to Cas before nodding to Sam and Dean in parting and exiting the way he’d come.

 

“I’ll take care of your armor,” Sam promises once they’re alone, just the three of them. “You take care of Cas.”

 

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Dean says and starts stripping down the rest of the way in front of the hearth. Buried in furs and ensconced in his bedroll, Cas doesn’t budge in the slightest, not even to watch. Sam, on the other hand, grabs up the metal portions of Dean’s armor to dry and grease it. “You treat that right,” Dean warns, and Sam rolls his eyes.

 

“I did pay attention to Dad, you know,” Sam gripes.

 

The truth of that is highly debatable, but Dean should be able to trust his brother with maintenance, at least.

 

Stripped out of all his sweaty garments, save his smallclothes, Dean shifts the pile of furs to climb into the bedroll behind Cas. Though Cas’ motions are sluggish at best and completely uncoordinated at worst, Cas does manage to roll over, pressing his cold hands to Dean’s chest.

 

“Nope, none of that,” Dean says. “Core first.” If the chill is too bad, warming the extremities can come at the cost of warming the center, where the life resides. “C’mere, all the way.”

 

Pulling and tugging as gently as he can, Dean gets Cas lying on top of him, cheek to chest, Cas’ legs between his and Cas’ cold hands tucked beneath Dean’s shoulders. For all Cas keeps showing up in Dean’s short term memory as a small thing, the man is actually sizable. He’s thick and heavy, more than enough to pin Dean down with the right moves.

 

“You tell me when you gotta piss again,” Dean threatens. “You listening to me?”

 

Cas shifts his head against Dean’s chest in what might be a nod. Lying on his back, Dean takes the brunt of the hardness of the floor, but he doesn’t try to move them. No, he stays still as long as he can. He shifts only to help put some more food into Cas, small bites of thick bread and small sips of scalding tea. The exertion of the climb took its toll on them all, but the limited fire of Cas’ body can’t all be spent burning food.

 

For longer than Dean cares to think about, he lies there under Cas, listening to Sam wiping at his armor and scrubbing at rust, straining to truly hear Cas’ breathing. Is it the damp of Cas’ breath that gathers in the dip of Dean’s clavicle, or is it his own sweat in the fur furnace of the bedroll? It doesn’t matter. He endures it all the same.

 

Arngeir comes down to prepare dinner for the rest of the Greybeards, and he answers the questions Sam puts to him, if only in circuitous, uncertain ways. Cas is the first Dragonborn this set of Greybeards has encountered; they have never trained another. Certainly, there are no records indicating that Tiber Septim encountered this problem of uncontrollable Thu’ums, or Shouting. A typical Nord would need a decade of meditation before mastering a single Shout, but a Dragonborn is not typical. Nor, in this case, a Nord.

 

In short: Arngeir does not know.

 

What he cannot offer Cas in wisdom, he offers in more material aid. The vial is small and stoppered, a pinkish purple kind of bottle that Dean has seen only rarely in Whiterun’s alchemy shop, or in Morthal’s, and never for less than six hundred septims apiece. That tiny vial is worth enough coin to furnish a room with all the trimmings, or rent at an inn for two months. A splash of healing is one thing, but speeding the natural regeneration of health is another. Honestly, the full distinction is lost on Dean; all he needs to know is the difference is an excruciatingly expensive one.

 

“If he can be made to drink it,” Arngeir says quietly, lowering his voice not for safety but in the assumption that Cas is asleep against Dean’s chest. Only the top of Cas’ head is visible, and that’s from Dean’s close vantage point.

 

“I got him,” Dean says. Without embarrassment, he shifts out from beneath Cas, as far as that’s possible, to better sit up. Stuck to the sweat of Dean’s chest and tangled together, their amulets move as one, linked, Stendarr and Mara, shield and magic, protection and love. Looking down at them, Arngeir clearly sees the tangled accessories, and there is no surprise in his eyes at the one Cas wears.

 

“Cas,” Dean says even as Cas tries to burrow back into him. With his upper body bare to the heat of the kitchen, Dean could bask in the relief from the bedroll and furs, but he’s got a job to do. “You’re not asleep. C’mon, man, you gotta drink this.”

 

Wearily, Cas lifts his head. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he responds well enough after Dean uncorks the bottle with his teeth and sets its lip against Cas’. Dean tips the vial at a gentle angle and keeps tipping the more Cas keeps swallowing.

 

“Better?” Dean asks, pulling the empty vial from his lips.

 

Nodding faintly, the side of his head still on Dean’s bare stomach, Cas opens his mouth and with one slurred syllable sends the bottle flying. It smashes against the far wall as Dean’s hand smacks against the stone floor, his shoulder wrenched.

 

Dean curses up a storm, more from surprise than pain or fear, but Cas takes to it poorly, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and trying to heal Dean with his other hand. The golden glow flickers above his palm, never fully shining.

 

“Dean’s fine,” Sam says before Dean can think to. “You didn’t hurt him, it’s all right.”

 

Cas bites down harder on his own fingers, something his skin definitely doesn’t need while recovering from the early stages of frostbite.

 

“C’mon, Cas, you know I like it rough,” Dean says, right in front of a Greybeard and his own brother.

 

Cracking open one eye, Cas glares up at him balefully.

 

“Let me get back under you, all right?” Dean continues with a wink. “Get me where I belong, and then you sleep.”

 

Groaning, Sam covers his eyes. “Master Arngeir, I’d like to apologize for my brother.”

 

“It has been a long time since I have conversed with outsiders,” Arngeir says while Dean shifts back down into the sweltering, sweaty space beneath Cas. “If you claim this is what passes for typical conversation nowadays, I will pretend to believe you.”

 

“Typical for us,” Dean says, and though he can hear Sam groan, he can also feel Cas smile against his chest.

 

“Then I will leave you to converse,” Arngeir states.

 

“I think I’ll come with you,” Sam says, and does, taking Dean’s breastplate with him.

 

Once alone, the sounds are few. Cas’ breathing, Dean’s own. The hearth with its pops and crackles. The scrape of a boot upon stone from up the stairs, and the smallest snatch of voices, only ever Sam’s and Arngeir’s.

 

Time passes.

 

Dean sleeps. He wakes. He frees himself to piss and forces Cas to do the same in the chamber pot provided. He helps Cas back into the bedroll, and Cas’ movements are steadier. He sleeps again.

 

When next he fully wakes, his stomach is rumbling fiercely and warm fingers stroke the curve of his bare shoulder. The light from the hearth has grown faint, though its heat has not. Or maybe Dean is simply so sweltering from head to toe that he can no longer tell.

 

Cas has shifted on top of him while they slept. Where before he lay between Dean’s legs, now they lie like two hands held tight, limbs laced like fingers, bodies ready to entwine. Dean lifts his own hands from Cas’ back, from the sweaty bend of his spine and his damp nape. Cas lifts his head in response, pushing up the furs with his shoulders and letting in a blessed burst of air between their chests.

 

“Looking better,” Dean murmurs, peering at him in the almost blackness of a windowless room. The angles are wrong for the hearth to light Cas’ face. In fact, though the light outlines him, it casts his actual features deeper into shadow. He can see as Cas nods, but it’s the tension in Cas’ body that’s a better clue to his thoughts.

 

“Still feeling rough, though, huh?” He keeps his voice quiet, too aware of Sam’s breaths coming from the other side of the hearth.

 

Propped up on his elbows and forearms over Dean, Cas pressing their lower bodies together is only incidental. Though it’s hot as a forge down there, there’s no heat between them, no grinding or shifting or nudging for more. They fit together nicely, their legs each framing a leg of the other, their sleeping dicks and hips lined up slightly off-center so no one gets a hard jab of bone to tender flesh. This is simply two men, companionably almost naked, staring at each other from close range.

 

“What?” Dean asks when Cas fails to settle back down against him.

 

Cas touches his face. His temple, to be precise, which is not the world’s most tender place for loving touches. But that is where Cas presses his fingers back to Dean’s skin, and it takes a minute and an insistent prod for Dean to realize this is an actual response.

 

“Thinking?” At Cas’ nod, Dean shifts back into the bedroll, trying to regain some of their earlier comfort. He keeps his eyes open because he has to, and asks, “What are you thinking about?”

 

Cas keeps poking him in the side of the head, one long, slow application of pressure.

 

“What?”

 

Cas starts tapping Dean’s temple.

 

“What am I thinking about?” Dean asks. It seems the wrong question, but Cas’ head bobs in the near-darkness and the prodding stops. “Uh. That I’m hungry?”

 

Cas shifts atop him, reaching out to the side, and there’s the clatter of a wooden plate bumped on a stone floor. Cas shifts back, something in his hand, and Dean opens his mouth on faith. He expects bread, bland and stale, but what he gets is mealy beneath smooth hardness. He’s hungry enough that he doesn’t spit the wizened apple out, but it’s a close thing between the tartness and the texture. Who in Oblivion is making the climb up here to give these old men apples, anyway?

 

Grimly chewing, Dean takes over the apple-holding duties from Cas. Though Cas sinks back down against him, the man’s alertness remains palpable. When Dean’s down to the apple core, he tosses it over into the hearth instead of trying to blindly find the plate. He belches quietly, more of a hiccup than anything else. Cas snorts against his chest. Dean licks his sticky fingers before threading them through Cas’ hair.

 

“Sleep,” Dean whispers, not really tired. Bedding down with Cas meant resting far earlier in the day than he’s used to.

 

Cas shakes his head, apparently having the same issue. He reaches up again to touch Dean’s temple.

 

Dean will need far more food in the morning, but maybe not now. He’ll have to piss, too, but not yet. Really, he’s fine.

 

“Thinking we should rest,” Dean says, “even if we aren’t sleepy.” As much as he hates to think it, he’s not up for much else. Seeing Cas brought low by the mountain is a boner-killer if there ever was one. That’s the wrong kind of fear, even for Dean’s dick. Maybe especially for Dean’s dick.

 

Clearly disagreeing about the whole resting thing, Cas pushes himself up again to take hold of Dean’s hand, pulling it from the back of his own head. Amused about it, Dean lets him. It’s almost endearing, the way Dean has to let Cas press his arm up and back, down against the lip of the bedroll beside Dean’s head.

 

“We can’t,” Dean whispers. “Sam’s right fucking there, man.” And health regeneration potions or not, Dean would rather hold Cas than fuck him right now. Rubbing and frostbite do not mix.

 

Cas shakes his head and presses a fingertip against Dean’s hand. He moves that touch in very deliberate ways, though it takes Dean a moment too long to catch on.

 

“Sorry, do it again?”

 

Cas repeats the pattern, something short that even Dean can spell.

 

“‘Why’ what?” Dean asks. “You gotta know why we can’t with Sammy right there.”

 

Propped up on one elbow, more crouched over Dean than properly lying on him, Cas gestures between them in a way that might include the bedroll. There’s something in the tilt of his head that hints at a frown.

 

“We’re like this ‘cause you were freezing,” Dean explains. “You don’t remember?”

 

Cas flicks Dean on the chest. He remembers. Dean’s answering the wrong question.

 

“C’mon, Cas, you can’t open with ‘why’ and expect me to get it.”

 

Cas exhales a sigh through his nose before reaching up to draw on Dean’s hand again.

 

This time, it’s Dean who frowns. “Why help you?”

 

Cas nods.

 

It’s not something Dean’s thought about. At all.

 

Defending the city from the dragon, that had been duty. Insane, but his duty. Accompanying Cas to Ivarstead and High Hrothgar, those were the jarl’s orders and Sam’s idea. As for the bedroll, Dean was the obvious choice.

 

What’s there to think about?

 

“Somebody had to help you,” Dean says, defensive, shrugging against the bedroll.

 

Cas stares at him through the dark.

 

“What?”

 

Slowly, deliberately, Cas brushes Dean’s Amulet of Stendarr aside to kiss him directly over the heart.

 

“Fucking weirdo,” Dean murmurs, fighting the urge to grab Cas by the hair and keep him there. It’s a strong urge, but one he can’t indulge, not when he’ll have to let go in the daylight.

 

Keeping himself in place all on his own, Cas smiles against Dean’s skin.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Game info for this chapter: while an Amulet of Mara enhances healing magic and indicates that the wearer is looking for a spouse, an Amulet of Stendarr enhances protection (proficiency with a shield) and, though available to anyone, are also worn by a group dedicated to hunting vampires and werewolves.
> 
> Also, I gave High Hrothgar a kitchen, because, c'mon, dudes. You have this great big conference room in a place where no one goes and you don't have a kitchen? Priorities, you should get some, Greybeards. 
> 
> To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading, everybody, and I'll see you next week!


	5. Save

The crux of the matter is, they have no idea how long it will take the Greybeards to train Cas. The Greybeards don’t even know, Arngeir explains over the porridge that is the monks’ breakfast. They also, Arngeir adds, only have very limited supplies on their mountain, the vast majority of their foodstuffs being donations carried up by pilgrims.

 

Sam and Dean cannot stay indefinitely. Without it ever being stated outright, Arngeir makes it very clear they should leave that day. They’re as recovered as they’re going to be, and Cas is well enough to no longer medically require a bedmate. Working from the viewpoint of sheer logistics and duty, there’s no reason to stay.

 

They got Cas up here. They know as much about fighting dragons as they’re going to learn, especially after Arngeir makes it clear that the Greybeards refuse to use their Shouts for violence. What’s more, Sam and Dean only left so much payment at the stable for their horses.

 

There’s no reason to stay.

 

Dean tells himself that, watching Cas’ downturned face as the man forces down salted porridge. Cas’ eyes lift from his bowl just the once, and the misery in them is as muted as his voice.

 

Sam gives Cas almost all of his personal effects enchanted against the cold. Down in the rest of the world, where it’s only early autumn, Sam won’t need them, and there will be time enough to make more before winter. Cas accepts the gloves and robes gratefully before pulling Sam into a tight hug. He holds on hard, gloves clenched in one fist against Sam’s back.

 

Before Dean can put on more than his chainmail, Cas approaches him for an embrace as well. Cas holds him more loosely, as if Dean is something more delicate in iron, steel, and leather than Sam is in mere robes. Cas holds him more loosely, but he does hold him, and it fucking hurts when Cas pulls back instead of nosing for a kiss.

 

With steady eyes and a wavering line in the place of his mouth, Cas helps Dean don his remaining armor. It’s greased up just the way it needs to be, and it looks like the damage the frost troll inflicted yesterday—that was _yesterday—_ isn’t as bad as it had seemed in the snowstorm.

 

Each additional piece of armor weighs Dean down. Each piece means more straps, more touches that Dean can feel less and less. Slowly, unrelentingly, Cas encases Dean in metal and cuts him off from the unending surfeit of skin that had been last night.

 

When Dean is suited up and the bags are packed, they all gather in the front hall to say goodbye. Cas and two of the Greybeards follow them to the front door.

 

“Stay inside,” Dean bids Cas, putting his empty hand on Cas’ shoulder, his shield heavy in the other. “It’s not worth it.”

 

Cas’ frown is one of severe disagreement, but Dean holds firm, and Arngeir echoes Dean’s rare moment of wisdom. Somehow, that only makes it worse.

 

Stubborn to the end, Cas reaches up with both hands to take hold of Dean’s horned helmet. In front of all four Greybeards and Sam, Cas drags Dean down for one final kiss. The inside of his mouth is soft and warm, the outside chapped and hard.

 

But then their mouths part, and their bodies part, and they themselves part. The door closes behind Dean and Sam and one of the Greybeards, and it is the end. When Cas is someday trained and ready, he will be as strong as a god, and Dean will still be a man, perhaps a dead one. No, it is the end.

 

The Greybeard who follows them outside of High Hrothgar is not Arngeir, and so he does not speak to them. Outside, he gestures for them to stand to the side before he faces the windswept mountain with its unending snow and freezing mist. The Greybeard tips back his head so far, his cowl threatens to fall. Angled as an arrow at the sky, he inhales deeply despite the sharpness of the air. A moment to pause, a moment for concentration, and then a roar bursts out of the old man.

 

Clouds overhead part. The wind blows in every direction at once, confused, before giving up entirely. Sunbeams replace airborne snow, enough that Dean has to shield his eyes against the gleaming blanket of snow on the ground.

 

“Thank you,” Sam manages to say first.

 

“Yeah, thanks,” Dean echoes, and the Greybeard nods back to them before returning inside.

 

Dean looks at Sam. Sam looks back.

 

They climb down the mountain.

  
  


In Ivarstead, the horses are fine. All three of them. Because they still have Cas’ horse. If Connie gives a shit that Cas is gone, she doesn’t show it. Baby, on the other hand, immediately picks up on Dean’s mood and has to be soothed the same way she would if Dean had fought some battle in her absence.

 

For once, Sam doesn’t say anything about it.

 

Naturally, the fucking innkeeper immediately does.

 

“Welcome back,” the man says brightly, looking between the two of them. “Suppose you’ll be wanting those beds back and dinner for three.”

 

“Just two,” Sam says, and the innkeeper clams up like they’re saying Cas died.

 

Dean takes to the room, removing and tending to his armor by himself. It’s difficult but not impossible. There’s a bit of rust that Sam must have missed last night, and Dean goes after it with a vengeance before it can destroy everything it touches, like a cancer in the metal. He spends the afternoon going over every last inch, and while he’s on his third pass through, Sam finally pops his head in.

 

“Hey,” Sam says.

 

His back turned to the bed he’d fucked Cas in, Dean grunts.

 

“So get this,” Sam says, a pair of papers in his hands. “I’m pretty sure I’ve pinned down where the dragon burial sites in the Rift are.”

 

“I’m not fighting another fucking dragon, Sam,” Dean says, not looking up. “This isn’t our hold.” And the fucking thing apparently won’t stay dead, anyway.

 

“Yeah, something tells me dragons don’t care about lines on maps,” Sam responds. “But no, that’s not it. We should swing by Riften and tell the jarl there. It’s only a day’s ride to the east from here. And then maybe we could go up through Eastmarch and tell the jarl in Windhelm and he could send word to the jarl in Winterhold. Or I could pay someone to take a letter to the Mage College. Those typically get delivered. I’m not saying we should head up to Dawnstar or back to Morthal, but we can at least send word before getting back to Whiterun. From there, Jarl Henriksen can send word to the High King on his own.”

 

“Yeah, fine,” Dean says, inspecting the undersides of his pauldrons.

 

“So we leave at first light for Riften.”

 

“Looks like.”

 

“We can use the third horse for our bags,” Sam says, still standing there when Dean’s already dismissed him. “Should be good for Baby. Less weight.”

 

“Yep,” Dean says, still not looking at him.

 

“You want dinner?”

 

“Nope.”

 

Sam doesn’t leave the doorway.

 

“Could do with an ale, though, if you’re offering,” Dean adds.

 

“There’s only wine and mead,” Sam answers, and it says a lot that he’s already checked.

 

Dean rolls his eyes up at the mounted stag heads. “What’s the point of being in the middle of nowhere if they only have the fancy pants options?”

 

“No clue. Come complain in person.”

 

“Maybe later,” Dean says and after another long moment of watching him, Sam finally leaves him to it.

  
  


They head out with Dean in the lead, riding Baby into the sunrise. Sam follows with Connie’s reins tied to Charger’s saddle, and the damn baggage horse doesn’t seem to understand that she is now a baggage horse. Every time Dean glances back at the dappled gray mare, he hates her a little more, but he hates the mountain rising up behind her the most.

 

Though it’s only early autumn, the foliage in this part of the Rift is racing along. Where Dean had spent the last two days tromping past snow and sparse underbrush, today he’s surrounded by plants the same color as the sunrise glaring into his face. The grass is yellow, the leaves are yellow and red, the bushes are orange with red berries. The white birches sport yellow, yellow, yellow leaves, and despite having always taken pride in the colors of Whiterun, Dean spends the morning growing ever sicker of that shade.

 

The stone road is in surprisingly good shape on this side, considering the troll that had lurked beside the road leading out of Ivarstead to the north. Dean wonders about it before remembering the lumber mill. Of course the road from the lumber mill to the city would be safe. The city and the lake port need their lumber, but fuck everyone else. Before noon, they pass no fewer than three patrols of guards in Riften purple. There hadn’t been a single one on the other side of Ivarstead.

 

The road brings them south of the great lake and north of the southern mountains. It bends, and at every crossroad, they turn east. The road grows steep, away from the lake below, hugging close to the land where the mountains jut high like tiptoeing intruders. The lake shines below and the breeze is soft, but these are details to be grudgingly ignored.

 

When the sun climbs high and Dean sweats to the point of removing his helmet, they stop for a brief lunch, standing while the horses nose at orange and yellow grass. The bright shades confuse the horses, too accustomed to the brown resignation of Whiterun’s surroundings, but they eat all the same. Dean crunches his way through half an apple before feeding the rest to Baby. He eats his bread and cheese and bit of cooked beef. He drinks from his waterskin and wishes for ale.

 

They mount their horses, the third still tethered to Sam’s and trailing behind. As the road bends back toward a narrow section of the lake to meet a stone bridge, there’s a scuttling motion down by the water that Dean knows all too well, and it’s no mudcrab.

 

The pair of frostbite spiders spot them. With their legs pulled tight to their bodies, the creatures would be half the size of a horse, but with all eight legs extended and their glittering eyes spotting prey, they spread wide, taking up twice the space that Baby does. The closer one spits, but Baby shies to the side the way Dean’s taught her, and the only venom that lands on Dean hits his raised shield.

 

“Dean, get back,” Sam says, hands raised and glowing with destructive magic.

 

Dean does not get back. Dean draws his sword and urges Baby at the spiders coming toward them. Baby charges forward, ready to trample, and Dean lets loose a battle cry so harsh and fierce, it tears his throat even as it sends the spiders scurrying, trying to hide behind slim birches. Sam shoots one down as it flees, but the other keeps going, scrambling down the bank to take shelter beneath the bridge. It’s easy to corner. Sam finishes that one off too, and Dean sheaths his unused blade.

 

“You _trying_ to scare the horses?” Sam gripes, remounting. It’s possible he’d gotten thrown from Dean’s battle cry, but Dean hadn’t been looking.

 

“Shut up.”

 

“I’m giving you until we leave Riften to stop being an asshole,” Sam tells him.

 

“And then what.”

 

“And then you gotta stop being an asshole.”

 

Dean kicks Baby harder than he means to and she takes off at a swift trot. Sam has the sense not to yell after him when there could be more giant killer spiders about, but he does make Dean slow down on his own. Dean has to stop and wait for Sam to catch up, because that bitch is as petty as a soul gem.

 

“Look,” Dean says once Sam catches up. “We got work to do. That’s what matters.”

 

“That’s some of what matters,” Sam says, drawing Charger forward to walk alongside Baby.

 

“So I’m going to do my damn job,” Dean continues over him. “I don’t have to be pleasant. No one would believe a happy messenger telling them about dragon attacks.”

 

“You’re telling me your bad mood is a perk.”

 

“I’m telling you to shut up about Cas.”

 

“When did I mention him?”

 

Dean gets his eyes back on the road.

 

They ride on.

  
  


The lake empties itself of fishing boats as they approach the city, the workforce returning to the docks as the sun tilts deeper into the west. When it at last dips behind the Throat of the World, the mountain’s shadow seems limitless, reaching them a full day’s ride away and stretching even farther.

 

Sam casts floating magelights for them both as they pass farms and a few creaking windmills. The lights draw looks, but even if the area around the city is as shady as the city itself, anyone getting a good view of Dean should know to steer clear.

 

They approach the high city walls only to find the southern gate closed. Dean dismounts to bang on it only for someone to shout down that the southern gate closes at sunset. They’ll have to go around.

 

With a groan, Dean leads Baby on foot, desperately needing to stretch his legs. Sam dismounts and does the same. They follow the line of the wall east and then north, picking their way through trees and around underbrush. They pass wide around a small camp of tents and bedrolls, travelers who have decided the risks of the wilderness are preferable to Riften at night.

 

At last, they reach the gate and the stables. One of the stablehands practically leaps to his feet at the sight of them, and Dean makes sure to be as terrifying as possible while extracting promises of good care for his horse. For all three of the horses, but Baby most of all.

 

“If anyone steals her, I will gut you,” Dean promises.

 

“My da would gut me first,” the stablehand answers grimly.

 

With that settled, they shoulder all of their belongings, everything but the gear for the horses. The guard stops them at the gate.

 

“Hold there. Before I let you into Riften, you need to pay the visitor’s tax,” he says.

 

“What’s the tax for?” Sam asks before Dean can do more than roll his eyes.

 

“For the privilege of entering the city. What does it matter?”

 

“Wrong answer, buddy,” Dean says. “This is obviously a shakedown. And as the captain of Jarl Henriksen’s guard on business with your jarl, I am a man who kills thieves. Are you a thief?”

 

“All right, all right,” says the guard, backing down like a milk-drinker. “I’ll unlock the gate. Can’t a man make a living?”

 

“Fucking bandit,” Dean mutters, not bothering to do it quietly. The guard bristles at that, but Sam pushes Dean through the gate before an actual fight can break out.

 

“We’re here to see the jarl, not end up in her dungeon, Dean,” Sam hisses.

 

Dean doesn’t give a shit.

 

This late in the evening, there’s nothing for it but to head straight to the inn. Inside the walls, the city isn’t so much divided by a small river as it is built into the lake. The buildings on the land side are stone; on the lake side, wood. The inn is on the western lake half, and they cross a bridge over the docks below. Beneath them, water laps at wood and rowboats knock against their moorings. Someone closes a door down there. That must be where the poor are living, in the lowest of the wooden houses, closest to the water and dual threats of flooding and slaughterfish.

 

The inside of the inn is warm and bright, a true tavern with rooms for rent presumably up the stairs. Sam approaches the bar and Dean follows, keeping an eye on their surroundings while Sam heads toward their goal. There’s merchants and guards, mostly Nords with a few Bretons and Redguards. As always, despite the caravan outside its walls, there’s no Khahjit actually inside the city. There’s a dark elf keeping to himself and an Argonian waiting tables. No one is blatantly picking pockets, but then, they wouldn’t be.

 

“Two rooms, please,” Sam says once they reach the bar, which is not the usual answer to “What’ll it be to drink, boys?”

 

The Argonian barkeep is pretty, her blouse cut in the pretense of having breasts. Behind the bar, Dean’s certain her tail slips out through a subtle hole in the back of her skirt, but for once, he’s not tempted to lean over the counter for a glance. “You’re in luck,” she says with that deep Argonian rasp. “We’ve just the two left. Ten septims each, payment up front. You boys want some dinner to go with it?”

 

“Please,” Sam says. Dean shrugs.

 

“Dinner first, then. I’ll show you upstairs after.”

 

They give the woman her money before taking up the other side of the table from the dark elf. He doesn’t look at them and they don’t look at him. “Watch my bag,” Sam says before getting up without giving Dean a chance to respond.

 

With one foot, Dean slides Sam’s bag under the table against his own and sets his shield down on top of both. When Sam returns, it’s with a mead in one hand and an ale in the other. He looks way too pleased with himself over getting Dean the ale, even if they are smack in the middle of Black-Briar mead territory. The smugness is only explained when the Argonian waiter comes by with their agreed upon dinners—plus half an apple pie.

 

“Thanks,” Dean grunts, saving it for last.

 

“Yep,” Sam says, just that, and thankfully shuts up.

  
  


The rooms are small. Smaller than what a poor noble would stick his housecarl in, but the straw beneath the furs is clean, and each room has a door that shuts, if not locks. Sam helps Dean out of his armor for the night before ducking back into his room to sleep. With only the light of a few candles in their goat horn holders, Dean tends to his armor.

 

He sits on the bed, the wooden edge of it digging in beneath his thighs where it holds in the straw, and he lets his mind grow blank in the familiar care of metal. It’s still dented in places from the frost troll. He’ll have to do something about it while they’re here. Maybe the blacksmith will let him borrow tools in exchange for coin or work.

 

Once finished, he lays it all out atop the chest that serves as a side table. He rearranges it a little. He sets his shield against the closed door so it will fall down with a clatter should anyone try to push the door open during the night. His bag goes onto the bed as both pillow and precaution.

 

Hemmed in by four wooden walls, he blows out the candles and lies down. When he sleeps, he sleeps alone, but he does sleep.

  
  


“The jarl is very busy,” the steward explains to them on the steps of Mistveil Keep.

 

“Too busy for news of the dragon threat?” Sam asks, much more politely than Dean would.

 

“I heard you the first time,” the steward says, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Return in the afternoon. She’ll have time for you then. Dragons, we’ve seen in the distance. The Black-Briar family is here now.”

 

“Fair enough,” Dean says, knowing enough about who’s shanked whom, politically and literally, to know to steer clear. He gives her his best smile, or at least the best one he has available. “Early afternoon or…?”

 

“Try for early,” the steward says.

 

They thank her and proceed to fritter away the rest of their morning. Dean follows the sound of hammers to the local forge to fix his armor while Sam wanders off to procure supplies in the adjacent marketplace. The blacksmith is willing to lend his hammer and table in exchange for some basic help around the forge. It would feel almost like old times, if it weren’t for the stink of fish and rotting seaweed rivaling the burning coal and heated metal scents of the forge.

 

As much as he can, he keeps his eyes down and his nose shut. Maybe spending his day literally across from the fucking Temple of Mara wasn’t the best idea. Sam comes round mid-morning, interrupting the very important process of making nails, nails and more nails—something boats need a lot of, apparently—to let Dean know he’s already rented their rooms at the inn for another night.

 

“Thanks,” Dean says, getting back to work. He’s pretty sure he’s already worked off whatever amount the smith was going to charge him for use of his space, but nails are simple and soothing and Dean gets to hit them a lot. The hammer and tongs fit his hands almost as well as his shield and sword.

 

“Dean,” Sam says.

 

Dean keeps hammering.

 

“Dean,” Sam says again.

 

“What?”

 

“You know I’m sworn to carry your burdens, right?”

 

“What are you, my housecarl?”

 

“No,” Sam says, gesturing down at himself in a classic motion of _you idiot_. Then again, the mage robes do make that pretty obvious. “I’m your brother, and I’m worried.”

 

“Well,” Dean says, not sure what to say. “Don’t be.”

 

“Give me a reason not to be.”

 

It’s not like Dean expected to keep him. What would a refined Breton mage want in Skyrim anyway? Even if he weren’t a Dragonborn, literally the stuff of legends and emperors, a Breton’s too politically savvy to settle for the son of a blacksmith from Morthal. A vampire-infested swamp full of trolls and frostbite spiders, that’s what Dean’s made of.

 

No, it was never going to last, and Dean’s an idiot for having started it in the first place. For having ever thought that Amulet of Mara was more than just a spellcasting accessory. He’s just a moron who got his hopes up, that’s all.

 

“Dean?” Sam says again, and Dean’s still standing there, the slim iron bar in his tongs growing ever cooler on the anvil.

 

“I’ll get over it,” Dean says, as much a promise to himself as it is to Sam. “C’mon, man, let me keep busy.”

 

“Yeah, fine,” Sam says with a sigh, but he settles in to watch.

  
  


The long hall of Mistveil Keep pales drastically in comparison with that of Dragonsreach in Whiterun. The hearth in the center is shorter by half, the ceiling not quite so high, and there’s a general sense of gloom in these stone walls Dean’s never felt in Dragonsreach’s airy wooden architecture.

 

They receive permission to enter an hour after their lunch, then stand before the hearth and the tables framing it while listening to the jarl settle the three disputes still in front of them. There’s a dock thing, a fishing thing, and a farm thing. There is a lot of pointing and shouting. Jarl Laila Law-Giver is a patient ruler and waits this out. Dean sweats in his armor, Sam smooths his robes, and they exchange glances. _This_ is more important than dragons?

 

Then again, if protecting timber from bandits is more important than protecting people from a troll, maybe he shouldn’t be surprised.

 

At last, the disputes ahead of them are put to rest, or at least bludgeoned into unconsciousness. The farmers depart—something about a thieves’ guild getting out of hand, something the jarl steadfastly denied—and Sam and Dean move forward when called.

 

“We bring news of dragons and the Dragonborn from Whiterun Hold,” Sam announces.

 

“We have seen the dragons flying above the mountains,” Jarl Laila replies, “and all of Skyrim heard the Greybeards call for the Dragonborn. What information does Whiterun have that the Rift does not?”

 

Sam tells her. They’ve killed a dragon. They’ve accompanied the Dragonborn to High Hrothgar. The Dragonborn himself told them how dragons are returning and, what’s more, he gave them a map.

 

Dean stands to the side and tries not to look too smug.

 

Sam explains the mechanics behind dragon souls and actually sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. Dean puts forward what he learned in their fight against their dragon outside Whiterun. He adds a myriad of methods that could prevent a dragon from reviving a second time, or even in the first place: the burning of bones, the separation of skeleton pieces, or—should the bones prove impervious to fire and the ligaments too strong to be severed—booby-trapping the surrounding area. The last is the classic Nord response, though typically to the draugr issue.

 

They offer a copy of the map, and Sam points out the material benefit that could be gained from plundering the bones before the dragons revive from their burial sites. Any ship with dragon bones in its masthead will be the backbone of the most intimidating fleet Skyrim has ever seen. Though that seems to be a compelling argument for the jarl, even more than the basic defense of her people—her guards already have everything under control, she claims.

 

At this point, it’s really none of Dean’s business. It’s not his hold. It’s not his duty.

 

The voice in his head that sounds exactly like his father’s reminds him that it’s still his job.

 

“With all respect,” Dean begins, a phrase that immediately makes Sam shoot a warning glare at him, “if we don’t act now, it will be too late.”

 

As he speaks, one of the heavy wooden doors of the keep opens. A light breeze enters, and the steward, seated beside the jarl, calls back to the newcomer, “This is the last matter the jarl is seeing today. Return tomorrow.”

 

The door shuts with a weighty catch of a latch. “I’m with them,” says a male voice, rough and low and only vaguely familiar.

 

Dean turns around.

 

Down the steps leading to the jarl’s dais, across the hearth and the tables surrounding it, there is a man. Lit by the hearth and yet fading into the shadows of the doorway, the man is in dirty leather armor, and he is impossible. He doffs his helmet, tucking it under his arm as a gesture of respect. Matted to his head, his hair is dark enough a brown to be black in the firelight. He carries no sword, carries nothing more than his helmet and the pack on his shoulders.

 

“Is he?” asks the steward, and for all Dean’s mind is screaming the same question, Dean has no idea what she’s asking.

 

“Jarl Laila, may I introduce the Dragonborn?” Sam replies.

 

Dean hears the jarl shift on her throne. He hears murmurs throughout the hall, the crackling in the fire and wind in the eaves, but his eyes are on Cas, on Cas’ mouth as he speaks yet again without destruction or wind or ice flying from his lips.

 

“May I approach the jarl?” Cas asks without a trace of a roar. If anything, his voice is too quiet, raw and hoarse. The sound of him is…

 

He’s…

 

“You may,” the steward answers.

 

“Thank you.” Cas moves to the side of the hearth, striding forward with dusty boots. He lets out a single harsh syllable and vanishes into a blur, one step taking him from the far edge of the tables to Dean’s side in an instant. For the time it takes to blink an eye, the entire room is stunned motionless.

 

And then it reacts.

 

Two confused guards draw their axes. The steward rises from her chair. The jarl straightens from leaning in her throne. Someone exclaims that this was a Shout, like the Greybeards do, and the entire room breaks into overlapping murmurs and cries of awe and dismay.

 

Cas stands placidly beside Dean, helmet still beneath one arm, his other hand hanging empty at his side. He is calm and unwavering. He leans forward in the slightest of bows, his neck held straight and his eyes on the jarl’s. “Good day to you. My name is Castiel.”

 

His eyes flick to the side, to Dean. “Hello, Dean.” Despite the jarring normalcy of his voice, the words still shoot through Dean, through blood and bone and sinew. “Sam. My apologies for the delay. I assume you’ve relayed the situation to the jarl.”

 

Like the overgrown little shit he is, Sam bows deeply to Cas, pressing one hand on Dean’s side to make him follow suit. “We have, Lord Dovahkiin,” Sam replies. It’s fucking ridiculous, but it does sound good.

 

Just like Cas, really.

 

“We were just finishing up,” Dean adds, straightening. “Provided Jarl Laila has no other questions.”

 

She immediately has more questions, and Cas answers them all. He moves to stand before Sam and Dean, framing himself with their presence and authority. Dean stares at the back of his head, at the sweaty curl of hair at his nape, and no one calls him out on his distraction. Even if someone did, Dean might not hear them, too focused on the bewildering sound of Cas’ voice.

 

“I would ask what matter delayed you,” Jarl Laila states, technically not asking. It’s one of those political posturing moves that drives Dean up the wall.

 

With Cas, though, nothing touches him. A faint smile in his voice, Cas answers, “I was in High Hrothgar this morning, consulting the Greybeards for their wisdom.”

 

“This morning,” Jarl Laila repeats.

 

Cas nods slightly and offers no explanation.

 

Searching for some sort of answer, Jarl Laila adds, “We heard their summons for you a week ago.”

 

Another slight nod. “The night we killed our first dragon, yes,” Cas replies, looking back at Sam and Dean in turn.

 

The jarl’s face holds a careful blankness that reveals more than it conceals. No one happy or calm looks like that. “Your first,” she repeats.

 

“There will be at least twenty more,” Cas says, voice remarkably steady in so many ways. “Should I have your aid in preventing their resurrection, you shall have mine in slaying them.”

 

Jarl Laila takes heed of that. Only a fool wouldn’t. They continue their discussion, going over every dragon burial site on the map that Sam holds out for them. When this is concluded, the jarl invites them to dine with her. It’s a damn fine dinner, though Sam and Dean are shunted off to the side tables with Riften’s court wizard and captain of the guard, respectively.

 

Cas is seated beside the jarl and her family. Despite having the best table manners of them all, he doesn’t appear mincing or weak. His are the refined movements of a goldsmith, not the fussy gestures of a man whose jaw is too weak to chew his own food. If Dean wants to admire the way Cas breaks his bread with his gorgeous fingers rather than ripping it with his teeth, then at least he is not alone in staring at the Dragonborn in this hall.

 

Jarl Laila asks Cas something, and it’s the first time Cas hesitates in answering her. He looks to Dean, then to Sam. “Sam, have you already procured lodging for the night?”

 

“We’ve two rooms at the Bee and Barb,” Sam answers. “They’re small, but I’m sure you can fit in Dean’s.”

 

Face carefully blank, Cas looks to Dean across the hearth.

 

“Yeah, there’s room,” Dean says, and Cas starts to smile.

 

“Let it not be said the hospitality of Riften is such as to force the Dragonborn to lodge with his retainers,” Jarl Laila says. “We will of course prepare a guest chamber for you.”

 

Cas turns in his seat to face her. He reaches to his own neck and pulls his Amulet of Mara out from beneath his armor. He smooths its discs down against the leather, drawing every eye to it with the motion. “Dean is not my retainer,” Cas tells her in a tone that is technically polite.

 

Dean maybe kind of adores him.

 

And maybe Cas kind of likes him too.

 

They leave Mistveil Keep as a trio, Cas again framed in the center. The keep’s doors and stone steps are flanked by guards, and Cas signals caution to Dean and Sam before either one of them can speak.

 

“Back to the inn, then?” Sam asks.

 

“The rooms even have doors this time,” Dean adds.

 

“You shouldn’t have to specify that,” Cas says, still clearly holding a grudge from Ivarstead. The Amulet of Mara still displayed on his chest, he slips his hand into Dean’s sword hand. It’s a foolish way to walk, even within the city walls—especially within these city walls—but Dean would be a bigger fool to pull away.

 

They walk in silence through the marketplace, past the blacksmith’s forge, back to the inn’s side entrance. The difference between Castiel unable to speak and Castiel choosing not to speak ought not be so immense, but it is. It looms. Dean’s tongue catches behind his teeth, his throat full of the urge to pester him with questions, but his mind is blank of actual words.

 

When they reach the inn, they head straight upstairs to Dean’s room. He sets down his shield and bag before sitting on the bed. Cas sets down his own belongings and takes a seat on the chest, leaving Sam to sit down on the bed next to Dean. Definitely not Dean’s preferred formation.

 

“So is that it?” Sam asks, evidently having the words Dean doesn’t. “Two days, and you’re fully trained?”

 

Cas shakes his head. “The Greybeards will no longer help me.”

 

“Dude, what did you do?” Dean asks.

 

Cas looks away, glaring at the floor. “Personally, nothing.”

 

“Then this is about you being in the Blades,” Sam says. “Unless you’ve got another affiliation you haven’t told us about.”

 

“No. That one is enough.”

 

“Then why did you tell them?” Dean asks.

 

Cas sighs, the exact sort of exhalation that would have been laying waste to their surroundings mere days ago. “My shouts were out of control because I’d been thinking in tinvaaksik.”

 

“Uh,” says Dean.

 

“Runes for words of power,” Cas explains. “To translate the Dragonstone. But words of power are what dragons use to shout. If I hadn’t already been well-versed in the language of dragons, I wouldn’t have had this problem.”

 

“But then the Greybeards wanted to know how you knew so much,” Sam reasons.

 

Cas nods.

 

Dean asks, “And they’re against dragonhunters, because…?”

 

“Because their leader is a dragon,” Cas answers, remarkably calm about it.

 

Dean sits up straight. “Is it the one that’s bringing the others back to life? Are those assholes sheltering that thing?”

 

Cas shakes his head. “He’s not the one I saw doing it.”

 

“Wait, you _saw_ it?” Sam asks.

 

“The one on the mountain, or the one reviving them?” Dean asks.

 

“Both,” Cas says. “That’s how we first encountered the dragon we killed.”

 

“What did that one look like?” Sam asks. “The one doing the reviving.”

 

“Black. Like ebony.” Cas shakes his head, eyes going distant, mouth pressing shut.

 

“So we’re hunting down that one first,” Dean says, and Cas’ eyes snap back to him.

 

“We,” Cas says.

 

“Yeah, dumbass, we,” Dean says. Beside Dean, Sam nods. “Unless you want to go hunting dragons on your own. You came after us for a reason, right?”

 

“You’re the only people I know,” Cas says, which is way less sentimental than Dean might have been hoping for. “Everyone else is dead or missing, and I don’t know what to do.”

 

“You come with us,” Sam says.

 

“The first one nearly burned me alive,” Cas says, his eyes again looking through Dean and into the past. Gone is the cool and collected Dragonborn who had verbally sparred with the jarl. Instead is a man overwhelmed and grieving and lost. “Twenty more… I can’t.”

 

“We’ll get ‘em one at a time,” Dean says. “Get some better armor for ourselves, have Sam enchant it against fire, and there we go. Easy.”

 

Cas looks at him like Dean is insane. After too long a wait, Cas says, “It should have been you.”

 

Dean shrugs. “It’ll be us. Look, man, I don’t care if all you do is come running in once the thing’s dead to absorb its soul. Well, no, I do mind—I’ll be fucking pissed if that’s all you do—but we’re doing this.”

 

“Dean, I came here to beg for your help,” Cas says, and the words make no sense. “Beg both of you. I don’t… This is beyond me.”

 

“One dragon at a time,” Dean repeats.

 

“And one jarl at a time,” Sam adds. “If we can cut them off at the pass, it might not be twenty dragons. So that’s Windhelm next.”

 

“It’s cold, you’ll hate it,” Dean warns.

 

“I’m going to hate everything,” Cas says flatly.

 

“Speaking of which,” Sam says, standing and picking up his pack. “I should probably leave you two alone, huh?”

 

Still seated on the chest, Cas stares up—and up and up—at Sam. “Is that it? That’s the entire plan?”

 

“You got anything else?” Dean asks.

 

Though looking like he wants to argue, Cas shakes his head.

 

“If we think of anything else, we can talk about it on the road tomorrow,” Sam says.

 

“That is, if you’re riding with us,” Dean says. “Instead of doing that shouty sprint thing you apparently do now.”

 

“I’d rather ride.”

 

“Then we’ll talk tomorrow,” Sam says. “I’m gonna go… read a book or something.”

 

“Could you make a run to the apothecary?” Dean asks.

 

“Dean, I already stocked up on fire resistance potions. If you want lube, you gotta go buy your own lube.”

 

“Fine,” Dean says with a put-upon groan. He summons even more bravado than he used when discussing dragon hunting, the picture of a man comfortable in his situation. “Cas, you rest and keep an eye on our stuff. I’ll be right back.” He tries to follow Sam out the door real quick, but Cas’ spot is right in front of the door and the room is fucking tiny.

 

Cas catches him by the wrist. Dean’s gauntlets prevent him from feeling the touch as more than a tug, but the sight of it, Cas’ fingers wrapped around steel, sends a tremor through Dean’s body that has nothing to do with a physical impact.

 

“Dean,” Cas says, the Amulet of Mara still hanging openly around his neck. Despite the ample heat rising through the floorboards from the kitchen below, Dean shivers. Sam’s door clicks shut and Cas still doesn’t say anything else.

 

“You saying no?” Dean challenges. “Your cock doesn’t get hard enough to push into my ass?”

 

Cas frowns up at him. “Is everything a competition with you?”

 

Dean frowns down at him. “What?”

 

“Are we lovers or sexual competitors?” Cas asks. “Because I honestly can’t tell.”

 

After a long, slow moment of his blood rushing past his ears, Dean shifts back inside the room and shuts the door. “Do you… _want_ to be lovers?”

 

“Do you?” Cas counters.

 

“I asked you first,” Dean says, because he is a mature adult who faces his fears.

 

“You wanted to see me again,” Cas says like he’s not entirely sure that’s the case. “I’m imposing to the point of endangering your life, but you did want to see me again.” He swallows, and fucking Talos, Cas is scared too. “You said you did.”

 

“Cas, man, I’m not the one wearing a sign saying I’m looking for a spouse.”

 

“That’s not what it means,” Cas says, covering the amulet with one hand.

 

“Welcome to Skyrim, buddy. Now are you in the market for a husband or not? ‘Cause I’m tired of guessing.”

 

“I’m not,” Cas says, and, all right, that’s a sensation in Dean’s gut right there. It’s a lot like being stabbed in the intestines, actually.

 

“Oh,” Dean says.

 

Cas frowns, brow furrowing like farmland in the spring. “Are you… disappointed?” He asks it as if the very concept is bewildering.

 

“You’re the one who came onto me in the first place,” Dean says, remembering that night on the switchback trail very well. He’s only been thinking about it for days.

 

“To be my lover.”

 

“Good enough to have, but not good enough to keep, huh?”

 

The frowning only gets worse. “We have very different ideas of what a lover is.”

 

“Sounds it,” Dean says. “You want to sort those out before or after we fuck, ‘cause I’m pretty sure the apothecary closes soon.”

 

Cas blinks.

 

“Sun’s gonna set, man.”

 

Cas stands up. He crowds in. He presses forward like he thinks he can get Dean to back up against the door, and Dean doesn’t budge. “Dean, one minute, I’m not sure you consider us more than allies, and the next, you’re angry I don’t want a spouse.”

 

“A spouse is an ally you fuck who gets your shit when you die,” Dean says, as simply as he knows how. “I mean, Sam gets first pick regardless, but if you don’t want _any_ of my shit-”

 

“I’m not going to let you die,” Cas interrupts, voice flat, eyes fervent.

 

Dean’s mouth goes dry.

 

“I’m gonna get lube, then,” Dean says, clearing his throat with a cough. “You, uh. You stay here and make sure nobody steals anything.”

 

Cas looks at him long and hard before nodding. “Be quick,” he says, and this time when he reaches up to kiss Dean, it’s not a kiss goodbye.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading, everybody, and I'll see you next week for the conclusion!


	6. Exit

The apothecary is very nearly already closed, and Dean’s requests are very nearly embarrassing, but, screw it. This is Riften. This is where everybody gets hitched. There’s no way this old man hasn’t had demands for lube at worse hours of the night.

 

Prize in hand, heart rattling his chainmail, Dean mounts the stairs back up to the main city level, away from the lower docks. He crosses a bridge and heads through the inn doors into the lit, warm bar. More than one patron catches sight of the item Dean carries, but Dean only pumps his fist in the air at the whistling before snagging an ale and mead for them at the bar. The jarl had offered Cas alto wine at dinner, but the mead is cheaper and Dean’s already paying for the guy’s bed and bedding.

 

Upstairs, he raps his knuckles against their door and says “Hey” before opening it. Though part of him has been half-expecting to find Cas bare on the bed, his common sense is surprised to see Cas has removed his boots and cuirass. His undershirt is sweaty and grey, and Dean needs to get it off him.

 

Oil jar in one hand, the necks of both bottles held in the other, Dean kicks shut the door behind him.

 

“Fight or fuck?” Dean asks.

 

Standing from the bed, his stocking feet upon the floor, Cas takes the bottles from him and sets them on the wooden chest. He reaches for Dean a second time, now moving to the straps and buckles of Dean’s armor.

 

“I’m cold,” Cas complains. “Warm me up.”

 

“Bossy.”

 

Eyes still on the motions of his own hands, Cas nods. “Yes. Now turn around.”

 

Dean turns around and Cas takes care of the rest, his movements perfunctory, his actions ones he clearly expects of himself. The Dragonborn— _he Dragonborn—_ is acting as Dean’s squire. As his housecarl. And when Cas removes Dean’s breastplate, he crowds in close, closer than the tiny closet of a room demands, and he scrapes his teeth against the back of Dean’s neck.

 

Dean turns around, already reaching. “Get naked.”

 

“You first,” Cas challenges, and that’s Dean’s gambeson and pants and everything else still to go, greaves and boots and all. “You wear too many layers.”

 

“Keeps me all in one piece.” Dean winks at him. “Plus it looks hot.”

 

Cas makes a face but doesn’t verbally contradict. “We need to get you better armor,” he says instead, pushing Dean to sit down on the bed. “Orcish, that would be sturdier.”

 

Dean snorts. “And expensive.”

 

“And worth it.” Cas unfastens one greave and the next.

 

“D’you think we could make armor out of dragon bones?” Dean asks. “That’d look badass.”

 

“I’m not sure how much protection that would actually offer,” Cas says, and just like that, it hits Dean all over again, how much Cas is actually talking. “It might be more resistant against flame, but carving bone is hardly the same as working metal. You-”

 

Dean leans down, bending himself in half on the bed, and Cas cuts himself off before Dean can smack their faces together. Cas pulls back a little, but only a little, and it gives Dean a better angle to kiss him. Kneeling on the floor, one hand on each of Dean’s knees, Cas readily opens his mouth to Dean’s tongue. Eventually, Dean’s back insists he pull away, but it’s a nice long time until he has to.

 

“I like you and I wanna keep fucking you,” Dean makes himself say.

 

“I agree,” Cas answers.

 

“Awesome,” Dean says. “If we both survive, do I get to keep you?”

 

“That seems a premature question.”

 

“Hey, we might not die,” Dean points out, but that doesn’t seem to be the bit Cas was talking about, weirdly.

 

“If we both survive, maybe I’ll keep you,” Cas allows. He looks down, working on Dean’s second boot. “But for now, let’s focus on surviving.”

 

Dean makes himself shrug. “Fair enough.”

 

Cas gets his boots off. He keeps going, removing both of Dean’s socks, and then he reaches up to work on Dean’s belt. Dean spreads his legs and lifts his hips, and his pants join his armor on the floor. The furs on the bed tickle the backs of his thighs, but nowhere near the degree that Cas’ fingertips do when they ghost up between his legs, urging his knees wider.

 

Not one for teasing, Dean reaches out to bury his hands in Cas’ hair and drag him closer. Cas glares up at him, pupils blown wide and black.

 

“Suck my dick or get naked,” Dean tells him.

 

Cas pulls back, eyes fluttering only slightly at the way he ends up pulling his own hair. “Say ‘please.’”

 

“It would please me if you sucked my dick.”

 

Cas slaps Dean’s knee, a very poor choice of spanking location.

 

“Feisty,” Dean snarks.

 

“Yes, you are,” Cas replies. He drags his hands back down Dean’s thighs, short fingernails used to their full effect, and Dean’s chin hits his chest, his eyes involuntarily closed. Cas makes a noise in his throat, quiet but amused.

 

Dean hooks a leg around Cas, trapping him against the bed frame. He forces his eyes open and looks down at Cas, one hand still fisted in his hair. He draws Cas closer and closer. “Suck.” Pull. “My.” Tug. “Dick.”

 

Eyes locked on Dean’s, Cas inhales deeply. He breathes out slowly, lips parted, a hint of teeth showing, and every last bit of air is a threat that has Dean tenting his smallclothes.

 

“Say it,” Cas orders, voice low and dangerous in so many ways.

 

As sarcastically as he knows how: “Please.”

 

With a faint smirk, Cas rises up on his knees, high enough that their faces are practically level with Dean leaning forward. Cas pulls at Dean, one hand hooked through his Amulet of Stendarr, the other still riding on Dean’s thigh. He leans up like a tree reaching for the sun atop a mountain. Lips pink, voice dark, he whispers, “No.”

 

Dean swallows, dick throbbing, leg muscles clenching. “No?”

 

“No,” Cas says, never looking away, not even blinking. “Not until you show me some respect.”

 

“I’m standing at attention, aren’t I?” Dean goes so far as to show him, pushing down his smallclothes and lifting his dick out. Honestly, it lifts itself, bobbing hard and high and proud. Dean frees his balls as well, waistband of his smallclothes digging up under them.

 

Cas keeps looking up at his eyes.

 

Slowly, deliberately, Dean starts jerking off.

 

Cas looks down.

 

His nostrils flare. His lips part.

 

Dean tilts his dick forward in a very fair offer, and he can actually see a decision being made behind Cas’ eyes.

 

Without touching Dean’s dick himself, Cas catches Dean’s wrist. “I’ll suck your cock,” he says, a challenge plain in his voice, “only after you take mine.”

 

“Easy,” Dean says. “I could ride you _years_ longer than you could fuck me.”

 

“Let’s see it.”

 

“Then get naked.”

 

Cas blinks before looking down at himself. “Oh. Yes.”

 

Smirking, Dean wriggles out of his smallclothes while watching Cas strip out of the rest of his clothing. He’s quick about it, too, chest flushing prettily, the color delicate beneath Cas’ relative lack of hair.

 

“All the way naked, this time,” Dean says, keeping his hands off of himself. “Let me see you.”

 

Thumbs hooked into the waist of his smallclothes, Cas pauses. The bulge of his sex is obvious beneath the cloth, but Dean’s still never seen it, only furtively touched it beneath furs. “Get on your back,” Cas tells him.

 

“Let me see you,” Dean repeats. “And maybe I’ll suck you a little while I work my ass open.”

 

“You can suck me while _I_ work you open.”

 

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

 

Cas finally shucks the last of it. His dick is just a dick, pretty and thick without being as pretty and thick as his fingers, handsome and pink without being as handsome and pink as his mouth. Dean’s ridden bigger, too, so he knows he can take it. It’s a good size for sucking.

 

The motion dizzying, Dean stands. He drags Cas against him, pressing all the way down, cocks bumping, pubic hair brushing. It’s supposed to be a show of force, it’s meant to be a moment of dominance, but then it’s kissing, just kissing, frantic and close and wet and not deep enough.

 

When their mouths part, Dean needs more, but he needs more of everything. He pushes on Cas’ chest only to stroke the broad expanse of it. “You get on your back.”

 

For once, Cas actually complies.

 

Dean puts the lube jar down next to Cas’ head and pulls over the alcohol for further measure. They’re not going to want to get up for it later. The booze goes on the floor next to the emptied chamber pot and the leg of the bed.

 

Propped up on his elbows, Cas watches his every motion, eyes on his muscles and scars and cock. When Dean smirks back, Cas rolls his eyes and gestures expectantly down at his own dick, still curving upward prominently.

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says before climbing into the bed, careful about it as he swings a leg over Cas’ middle, making sure not to kick him in the face. Before he can hunker down over Cas’ dick, Cas grabs him by the hips and drags Dean’s ass to where he wants it, hot breath growing hotter against Dean’s crack. And Dean, well, maybe Dean lets him. Just a little. The same way he lets his head hang down between his shoulders, his hands on Cas’ thighs, his mouth above the leaking head of Cas’ cock.

 

“You know what you’re doing back there?” Dean asks when Cas does nothing more than hold him in place. Cas doesn’t even use his thumbs to spread him open, much less reach for the lube. “‘Cause I got a couple pointers if-”

 

Cas _smacks_ him across the flank.

 

Dean’s head drops like a horse relaxing into a trot. His mouth meets dick in an unintended kiss.

 

Twitching his own hips up, Cas hums a satisfied noise. Hot and smooth, the shaft of his dick rubs against the corner of Dean’s mouth, against his cheek. It’s a cock made for a mouth, the same way Dean’s ass is made for hands, his nipples for teeth. Cas squeezes at his cheeks, finally spreading them open, but the bastard must just be looking at Dean’s asshole, not doing anything about it.

 

“You hurt your hand?” Dean taunts. He rubs his cheek against Cas’ dick in a motion too aggressive to be called nuzzling. Cas hisses at his stubble but Dean doesn’t relent, not until Cas is smacking his ass again, so hard and bright and red that Dean is leaking with it. “C’mon, Cas, you gonna beat my ass or fuck it?”

 

A growl low in his throat—and fuck if that isn’t dangerous, and _fuck_ if Dean doesn’t get even harder—Cas squeezes Dean’s ass cheeks viciously, thumbs framing his pucker, and the first touch of hot wetness has nothing to do with the lube.

 

“Oh fuck,” Dean swears, voice abruptly high and keening. “You dirty, fucking, _oh_.”

 

Cas spreads him wider, wriggling his tongue inside. It’s barely anything, but it’s hot and it’s wet and it’s working him open. Dean rocks back against him, his balls against Cas’ chin, and Cas pushes Dean’s hips up to spank him again.

 

Dean goes down on him. He has to. Knees on fur-covered wood, barely cushioned by the straw in between, Dean ducks his head down and gets that cock between his lips. He fills his mouth and weaponizes his moans. It’s for Cas’ benefit, the noises he’s making. It’s to get Cas hard and aching and desperate to blow his load inside Dean’s ass. He skips straight to the sucking, forearms braced on Cas’ thighs, one hand wrapped down around the shaft, stroking up when he bobs down.

 

In the best contest of wills Dean’s had in years, Cas retaliates on Dean’s ass. But not with aggression, no. Cas isn’t warfare, he’s politics, and he sweeps his tongue around Dean’s asshole instead of making a direct assault. Long, broad strokes of the tongue get Dean wet and twitching, fighting to squirm. Cas’ hands keep him spread and fight him still. His palms slap whenever Dean stops sucking him, but only until Cas learns that bad behavior shouldn’t be rewarded.

 

Then the slaps come regularly. A swipe and a thrust of the tongue, followed by a smack. Cas sucks on his rim before spanking him as hard as the angle allows, and Dean muffles himself on dick, drooling down the shaft.

 

The blows to his ass relent, Cas returning his hands to the splaying position, but the licking doesn’t resume. No, Dean’s cheeks get spread wide, but there’s nothing against his pucker, no lips or tongue or teeth, not even a thumb. There’s just empty air and chilling spit, and he can feel his asshole twitch in anticipation. Dean forces himself to stop sucking. The air he gasps in is just as cold in his mouth as it is on his ass, but at least it still tastes of sweat and salt and seed.

 

“You just gonna stare at it?” Dean rasps, his throat sounding as well-fucked as it is.

 

Cas spits.

 

On his asshole.

 

It trails down. The spit. It trails down the cleft of his ass. Down to his balls. Dripping.

 

Dean stops breathing.

 

Cas spits on him again.

 

Dean groans, loud, against Cas’ thigh. It drips down again. Maybe it drips onto Cas’ chest. His chin. His chin must already be shiny with spit. His pink lips turning red. Like Dean’s fucked his mouth or kissed him stupid.

 

Cas releases him, and Dean’s hips twitch down for more, chasing him. He sneaks a hand down between his legs only for Cas to make a noise of disapproval, and Dean’s hand is back on Cas’ thigh before Dean can think. Cas makes another noise, too, that of finally uncapping the jar.

 

After Cas’ mouth and spit, the lube is cold, but though Dean shudders and twitches, he doesn’t pull away. Not when he’s finally getting those fingers. Finger. Just the one, just to start. Dean spreads his legs wider. His knees dislike the bed, but his ass doesn’t care. He wants more. He needs more, and Cas gives it to him.

 

Cas thrusts inside with one thick finger. So thick. Drier than his tongue, colder with the lube, but infinitely firmer when it curls inside him.

 

“Fuck me,” Dean gasps, and it’s not begging. It’s a dare. “Cas, Cas, fuck me.”

 

Cas spits on him again, and the saliva drips down over Dean’s rim to meet Cas’ finger. “Say ‘please’.”

 

“Please.”

 

Cas’ breath catches. His cock twitches in Dean’s hand.

 

“Please,” Dean says again, playing it up. That’s all he’s doing, playing it up. “Please, Cas, please fuck me.” His mouth wants to keep talking, so he stoppers it up with cock.

 

Cas _rams_ a second finger inside him.

 

Dean makes noises. The kind of noises that make blowjobs incredible, the kind of noises a guy makes on purpose. Those are the noises he makes, the better to drive Cas wild under him. But Cas stays so steady, so devastatingly constant, that Dean has to keep making those noises.

 

Cas stuffs his ass full with lube before spanking his cheek again, palm firm, fingers slippery. “Turn around,” Cas rasps.

 

Dean shifts on shaking legs, his ass sloppy and wet and loose. Chest red, lips redder, Cas slicks up his own cock with one hand, the other tight on Dean’s hip.

 

“Ride me,” Cas orders.

 

Thighs twitching, Dean lowers himself down, feeling around for Cas’ hand and cock. Together, they line Cas up. Together, they get Cas to the breaching point, hot and thick and delicious against Dean’s hole. Cas’ hips make these tiny, jerking thrusts upward, and Cas bites his lip, looking so damn pretty. He’s fucking gorgeous, that’s what he is, fucking and gorgeous.

 

Dean works himself down, grinding his way down Cas’ cock. A clench and a squirm. A lowering of the body. Pulling back up an agonizing inch, just to do it again.

 

Eyes shut tight, Cas bares his throat, head tipped back against the furs. He grabs at Dean’s thighs and groans when Dean squeezes him with his knees. He groans when Dean squeezes him with a lot of things.

 

At last fully seated, Dean chuckles low and deep, as low as the fire in his belly and as deep as the cock in his ass. “You think you can last?” he challenges. He leans forward with a sinuous play of his core muscles, leaning over Cas as far as he can without losing that dick inside him. He clenches with his ass and squeezes with his hands, and Cas’ mouth goes lazy and lax. His eyes turn hazy, more dark than blue. “You’re gonna come so hard, I’ll be shitting you out for weeks.”

 

At that, Cas blinks his way back to a more focused mood. “That’s disgusting.”

 

“Says the guy with his tongue up my ass.”

 

For a second, Cas looks like he wants to protest, but he settles for scraping his fingernails down Dean’s thighs, steadfastly ignoring Dean’s cock. He doesn’t ignore Dean’s ass, though, his hips begging for motion with these soft little jerks. It drags his dick through Dean’s insides, just barely, almost enough.

 

With a pleased hum, Dean starts to move. Lifting himself up. Fucking himself down. Up and down, fisting himself, tempting himself. He learns that Cas likes to start slow but goes faster and faster with time. He learns that grinding down fully sheathed is only for his own benefit, but pausing with Cas’ cockhead barely inside him will drive Cas mad and send those hips fucking up into him.

 

When Dean does it the second time, Cas tries to surge up. Cas tries to roll them over, and Dean _shoves_ him down with a triumphant laugh only for Cas to start spanking him again. Dean groans but holds firm, pinning Cas down by the shoulders. It stops the spanking, an unfortunate consequence, but it does pull Dean farther away from the edge.

 

“Kiss me,” Cas orders.

 

“If I wanted a mouth full of ass,” Dean pants, once again riding Cas’ dick into the bed, “I’d eat yours.”

 

Glaring, Cas fumbles over the edge of the bed and comes back up with a bottle. He passes the mead to Dean, who uncorks it and passes it back. Cas spills the amber liquid into his mouth and across his cheeks before rising up on one elbow to spit it out into the chamber pot.

 

Mead’s basically on par with ass, but the gesture deserves a kiss. Dean shifts in his position astride Cas’ lap, pulling at one of Cas’ shoulders until Cas is sitting up, his stomach muscles straining, sweat and mead dripping down his chest. His dick shifts inside Dean, rubbing at a brand new angle that brushes against so much sweetness. Wrapping an arm around Cas’ shoulders, Dean grinds his dick up against that gleaming belly, but when he leans in for his kiss, he gets the lips of the bottle pressed to his instead.

 

Cas’ eyes gleam when Dean gives in and drinks. It’s a feat of coordination in itself, not spilling while Dean rides Cas, especially at this angle. Instead of swallowing, Dean presses his mouth against Cas’, and Cas opens up. It’s nasty, cloyingly sweet, but Dean’s revenge is thwarted when Cas only hums happily. The mead drips from the corners of Cas’ lips, trailing down through his stubble, and Dean licks it up, honey and all. Dean’s motions atop Cas’ lap slow, the kissing more important than the cock up his ass. They drink and share and kiss until their mouths taste only of mead and air, and Dean’s sure to rub the head of his dick against Cas’ stomach, guiding it with his hand.

 

At last, they finish the bottle, and Cas promptly dumps the thick glass back on the floor. He licks back into Dean’s mouth with another pleased sound. His hands move from Dean’s back and shoulders down to his hips. He tries to move Dean faster, but Dean’s not having it.

 

His thighs and rim burn, each in an entirely different way. He’s so fucking full, spread so fucking wide across Cas’ ample lap. He needs harder, needs faster to shoot off, but that’s not the point now, is it?

 

“Gonna fuck your face,” Dean tells him, a low groan of words. “Gonna make you come in me, and then...” He presses one thumb against Cas’ lips, and Cas opens for him immediately, sucking hard. “You want that?” Dean asks, spurred into harsher motions. He can’t rise up so far without risking Cas slipping out, but fuck if this position isn’t great for squeezing Cas’ hips with his thighs.

 

Cas groans, squirming under him. His hands fly from Dean’s hips down to the frame of the bed, and he starts to buck up, jamming himself deeper into Dean, his cock thickening, their eyes locked right up until Cas has to close them and come. Cas bites down on Dean’s thumb and it fucking hurts but Dean is built for that shit. Cas bites down, a moan trapped in his throat, and they are face-to-face and Cas could blast him off his lap if he wanted to. Cas could send him flying through the wall or freeze him in ice or set him on fire, and Dean has to grind down against the dick still pulsing in his ass or go mad. It’s hot and wet and worth it.

 

“Told you,” Dean gasps, clenching his ass until Cas whimpers. He drags his thumb free of Cas’ mouth and stoppers Cas up with his tongue instead. Cas sucks on him lazily, distractedly, hands and hips twitching against Dean’s body. Cas slows down, and slows down, and finally he breaks the kiss to breathe heavy breaths and stare with heavy-lidded eyes.

 

Slowing his own motions to a standstill, Dean sits astride Cas’ lap with lube and come leaking out of him, and he rubs the head of his dick against Cas’ belly. Back and forth. Up and down. Smearing precome across skin and muscle and shining sweat.

 

“I could ride you all night,” Dean boasts in the quiet space between their mouths. His own aching thighs call him a liar, but by the awe in Cas’ eyes, Cas believes him just fine.

 

Nodding, nose brushing Dean’s, Cas says, “Ride my face.”

 

“With my cock or my hole? You gonna clean up the mess you made?”

 

“Tempting,” Cas says, and his hand on the small of Dean’s back dips lower, one finger tugging on Dean’s swollen rim.

 

Dean swears and flexes and Cas swears too.

 

“Off,” Cas tells him. “Get off.”

 

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Dean says, and Cas gives him the weakest swat of a spanking for it.

 

Dean pulls off anyway, careful and slow about it. There’s the familiar split-second of panic where his body tells him he just took a dump on Cas’ lap, but that’s just Cas’ dick leaving his ass. He feels his rim flutter and his insides shift, and then Cas comes back in with freshly lubed fingers, reaching around Dean’s flank at an awkward angle.

 

“Lie back down,” Dean tells him.

 

“You lie down,” Cas says, and he works his fingers back in a little deeper. Involuntary, Dean rocks against them, and his own hand wraps back around his dick. “None of that.” Cas tugs at Dean’s arm with his free hand. “Do you want my mouth or not?”

 

Dean kisses him. That’s involuntary too.

 

Cas lifts the hand not in Dean’s ass up to Dean’s neck. He gets his thumb right where the pressing is good, and then he exhales into Dean’s mouth, slow and controlled and no less dick-achingly terrifying for his new-found restraint.

 

“You want to risk it?” Cas whispers. “You know what I could do to you, Dean.”

 

Cursing quietly, Dean fucks his ass down on Cas’ fingers. Maybe it’s lube leaking out of him, maybe it’s Cas’ seed, but the burning heat of it is so fucking good, stretched and abused and almost, _almost_ what he needs.

 

“Lie down.” Cas tightens his grip on Dean’s throat and Dean’s dick jerks up against Cas’ stomach all by itself. Cas’ eyes go wider, darker, if that’s possible. With his pink lips bruised with kisses, his hair tousled with sex, his collarbones shining with sweat and spilled drink, with his voice and his body and the power in both, he is irresistible, and for once, Dean doesn’t even try to put up a fight.

 

For what he’ll claim is the first time in his life, Dean rolls over.

 

It rubs them together, Dean getting on his back. It pulls Cas’ fingers out of his ass, too, but then Cas is pushing Dean’s hips down against the fur-covered straw and the wooden bedframe starts creaking again as Cas wrestles him into position. Dean’s head brushes the wall, his shoulders set against it, his legs sprawled down the bed with Cas in between. The bed isn’t long enough for both of them, not like this; Cas’ feet hit against the opposite wall, the room barely wide enough to fit the bed itself, let alone two men hanging off either end.

 

Cas bullies Dean’s legs wide, forcing Dean’s thighs open around his shoulders. Cas thrusts a pair of fingers back inside, the angle better, squishing out his own spend. He doesn’t fuck Dean with his hand, only stretches him as he kisses Dean’s hip. Cas steadfastly ignores the true ache between Dean’s legs until Dean takes his own cock in hand and smacks Cas on the cheek with it.

 

The baleful glare Cas directs up at him could kill lesser men. It nearly finishes Dean off as Cas, still glaring, deigns to put his mouth where it belongs. He sucks Dean’s dick like he _hates_ him, like the only thing that keeps him sucking is the love of the silk-steel flesh inside his mouth, like it’s only the dick and not Dean he wants.

 

Cas’ fingers reveal the lie. The way they twist in Dean’s ass. The way they push and seek without tearing or jabbing or fucking. The way they find the place Cas’ tongue was too short to reach, the place Cas’ dick could only brush past with the angle of their fucking. Cas’ fingers find the good place, the best place, and they stay there, rubbing too hard until Dean is leaking down Cas’ throat, thighs trembling, hands clenching, body twitching on the edge.

 

Dean’s mouth is open. He’s saying things. He must be saying things because he’s out of breath and dizzy, and the furs slide over the straw as he jerks his hips lower down against Cas’ hand, as he thrusts deeper into Cas’ mouth.

 

Cas pushes down hard on Dean’s stomach, and Dean freezes. His muscles jump and twitch and shake, but he freezes as much as he’s able, and Cas hums hot and lovely around him.

 

Dean doesn’t say please.

 

He’s almost certain.

 

But he needs…

 

He _needs_.

 

Cas pulls off his dick, which is the opposite of what Dean needs, but Cas, fuck, Cas is some kind of genius. A golden glow illuminates Cas’ face from below, from between Dean’s legs as Cas starts to cast. As he starts to cast _inside Dean’s body_. The sudden warmth tingles his ass from the inside out. The aching of his thighs and used rim abate first, but the healing doesn’t stop there. Some muscles relax, but others, others tighten back up. His ass goes from nice and loose to clenching down hard. Cas’ fingers go from a reasonable fit to the biggest stretch in the world.

 

Dean howls.

 

His body. Thighs. Ass. Curled toes. Arched back.

 

Tension.

 

Tight.

 

Cas’ mouth.

 

Around him. Wet.

 

 _Pulling_.

 

Dean comes until he cries. Gasping. Shaking. Head thrown back. Hair between his fingers. Cas between his legs. Shaking. Cas swallowing. Dean shaking. Breaths. Chest heaving. Throat pained.

 

His ass burns as Cas tugs his fingers free. Cas shakes out his cramped hand before tugging Dean down, before leaving a smear of mess on Dean’s hip. He climbs on top of him, thrusting his seed-coated tongue into Dean’s unresisting mouth. Dean flops his arms around Cas’ back.

 

Cas sighs into him. His chest is sticky against Dean’s. His weight is blissful, trapping Dean to the bed in his weakened state. Dean turns his face away, the better to breathe, but Cas keeps nosing in for more kissing. Their mouths shift against each other before, finally, they simply press, settled against each other, following the example of their bodies.

 

Much too soon, there’s a knock at the door. More of a one-two pound, someone striking the doorframe with the side of their fist.

 

“All I need is a yes or a no,” Sam calls through the door. “Dean, are you all right?”

 

“’m good,” Dean rasps as loud as he can. Cas ducks his head to snort against Dean’s throat.

 

“Great, let’s never talk about this again,” Sam says. His footsteps trail away, and then a door audibly closes on the other side of the wall.

 

Biting the side of his hand, Dean manages to keep from laughing.

 

Cas lifts his head to nip at Dean’s fingers in turn. The motion makes their chests slide together. Their legs shift a bit more. It’s not half bad, having Cas lying atop him without the threat of hypothermia.

 

“You were very loud,” Cas says quietly. “I can see how he might be alarmed.”

 

Dean lowers his hand from his mouth, preferring to hold Cas by the hair. “Oh, _I_ was loud.”

 

“Mm.” Shifting even higher, crowding even closer, Cas trails his lips down to Dean’s ear. “You were.”

 

Their tired cocks press together, skin against skin, and dampness aside, it is the most comforting touch the world has ever known. It is a companionable silence of the body. It is perfect and lovely and can only last so long.

 

“I gotta take a dump before I leak everywhere,” Dean mumbles, strangely embarrassed.

 

“I should make you stay like that,” Cas says, as if he’s seriously considering it. As if it’s within Cas’ power to enforce. “Full of me.”

 

Face flushed, body cooling, Dean snorts. “Didn’t take you for a farmer.”

 

Cas lifts his head to blink down at him. “What?”

 

“You plowed my ass and planted your seed, what else do you call it?”

 

Even as he tries to glare, Cas’ lips twitch. “Get up, then.”

 

“You gotta get off me first.”

 

Rolling his eyes like Dean’s the most inconsiderate person to ever live, Cas lifts off him and settles down against his side. Like the fucking pervert he apparently is, Cas doesn’t even look away from Dean’s face as Dean kneels beside the bed, scooted back over the chamber pot. Cas just watches him through half-lidded eyes, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

 

“What?” Dean demands. “Never seen a guy shit out your spunk before?”

 

Another eyeroll. “I was just thinking.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“There isn’t a single piece of this situation I don’t hate,” Cas says, “except for you.”

 

Dean looks away, far too vulnerable in his nudity and most of all this position. The wooden planks of the floor dig into his knees even worse than the bed had. “I’ll be sure to tell Sam you hate him.”

 

A motion catches Dean’s eye and instinct forces him to look as Cas signs _danger, mage, ice magic._

 

“You’re a complete asshole,” Dean says, half-marveling and yet entirely unsurprised.

 

“You’re not very clever, are you.”

 

Dean finishes cleaning himself before climbing right back into bed. He frames Cas’ body with his hands and knees. Lying on his back, stomach and bare cock utterly exposed, Cas looks up at him without fear.

 

“I’m cold,” Cas complains. He pulls Dean down with arms devoid of gooseflesh. His skin is warm. His nipples are pebbled, but, well, Dean’s right there, after all.

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“I am.”

 

“Sure.” Dean pushes at him. “Get under the fur, you idiot.”

 

“It’s itchy,” Cas grumbles.

 

Dean gets under the top layer of fur, leaving one between himself and the straw, and Cas follows. Dean holds him tight and Cas holds him tighter.

 

“I like talking to you,” Cas says.

 

“Great,” Dean says. “Now shut up and sleep.”

 

They do.

  
  


In the morning, Cas dresses him. It’s slow and careful, deliberate but not hesitant. Though Dean adjusts the fit of this piece and that, they work silently, speaking by looks and touch. When they finish, Dean is fully equipped, save for his helmet, shield and gauntlets, and Cas is still as naked as the day he was born.

 

Unabashed, sitting back down on the bed, Cas looks him over. The turn of his lips is pink and lush. His nipples are pebbled in the faint morning chill, his cock sleeping against his thigh. Dean licks his lips and glances up to Cas’ eyes, pleased to find Cas looking back.

 

With one hand, Dean reaches out. His fingertips press over Cas’ heart like the five points of a star. Dean presses a little harder, and Cas wordlessly stays on the bed, eyes dark, legs spread.

 

Slowly, lumberingly, Dean lowers himself to the floor. He lays his arms atop Cas’ thighs, giving him the contrast of warm hands and cool metal. He bows his head and kisses Cas’ cock awake.

 

Cas sighs and leans back, giving himself up with ease. He gives Dean everything, fingers in his hair and heat in his mouth. He gives Dean hitching sighs and whispered praise.

 

When they’re finished, Dean spits the bitterness out in the chamber pot and Cas leans down to kiss away the rest. Dean sits back on his boots, greaves digging into his shins, and Cas holds himself up on Dean’s steel-clad shoulders. It’s perfect and theirs in this tiny closet of a room.

 

Pulling back, Cas looks down between their bodies, down between Dean’s thighs. He tilts his head in question and Dean shakes his head in answer. He can wait. He even likes to wait, sometimes.

 

Cas nods back and stands. He helps Dean to his feet, a gesture as sweet as it is unnecessary. He wipes at his spent cock with his much-abused tundra cotton handkerchief but he still doesn’t dress immediately.

 

“Sure you’re not cold?” Dean taunts, and Cas merely rolls his eyes before stepping in, skin against metal, to kiss him quiet. To Dean, it feels nearly like nothing. Like faint pressure, spread across his body over padding. Like demanding lips and an insistent tongue, and no more.

 

Whatever Cas feels, though, clearly excites him. He wraps his muscled arms back around Dean’s shoulders. He kisses Dean deep and controlling, holding Dean still for the calm, unrelenting onslaught of his mouth. He exhales the occasional hard puff of breath, and Dean starts to reconsider waiting for later.

 

“We need to get going,” Dean tells him instead. “Long road to Windhelm.” It’s about a three day journey without bandits or dragons, and it’s proof of how mad the world’s gone that Dean can think of those two in the same category of travel delays.

 

Cas pulls back with a regretful noise before dressing himself. It’s fast and efficient, not at all a tease. At least, not until Cas dons his Amulet of Mara and tucks it back under his leather cuirass. Cas doesn’t look at Dean, but Dean looks at him, sure as sunrise.

 

“All I’m saying,” Dean tells him, putting on his cap and helm, “is that I get first dibs.”

 

Cas looks at him so oddly, Dean has to wonder if the guy’s forgotten he can talk now. But then Cas openly asks, “Dibs on what?”

 

“You.”

 

Cas shoulders his pack. Throughout, he keeps looking at Dean oddly. “You ‘get my shit’ if I die?”

 

Dean shrugs. “That too.”

 

The corner of Cas’ mouth twitches. “All right.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

Cas nods. “Until we end this, or it ends us.”

 

“Better live, then.” When Dean leans in for one last kiss, Cas takes his helmet by the horns to hold him steady. “C’mon,” Dean says against his mouth. “Breakfast.”

 

Cas sighs like Dean is depriving him of his one joy in life. Which is ridiculous, because even bad breakfast is still breakfast.

 

They squeeze themselves out of their tiny room through its door, find Sam’s room open and empty, and head downstairs. Sam’s got a spot at a table across from a Nord and an Argonian. Everyone’s intent on their fresh bread and butter. When Dean sits down, the Nord puts a protective arm around her plate of bacon. Dean shoots Cas a look, a silent moment of mockery, but Cas doesn’t seem to have noticed the other Nord, his eyes already intently on Dean.

 

“What?” Dean asks.

 

“You sat very easily,” Cas says, voice lowered but definitely still audible to everyone at the table, Sam included.

 

“I don’t need to know,” Sam announces.

 

“Your brother is a braggart,” Cas says anyway.

 

“That, I already knew.”

 

Rolling his eyes, Dean gets back up. The waiter is nowhere in sight, so he’ll have to order at the bar. “Watch my stuff. Cas, what do you want for breakfast?”

 

Cas tells him, and Dean goes to fetch it like he really is Cas’ retainer, or husband. When he returns, Cas and Sam are talking, actually talking, and Dean sits close just to listen to the novelty of it. Dean eats his bread and bacon. He drinks his ale. The thunk of the empty bottle against the table gets Cas’ attention.

 

Mead in his own hand, Cas frowns at Dean’s bottle. Entirely seriously, he says, “I would have shared.”

 

Sam snorts. “Only if you want to torture him.”

 

Cas’ frown deepens as he turns to look at Sam.

 

“Dean hates mead,” Sam says simply, treating it like the fact of life it is. “He wouldn’t drink it even with his tongue dried and salted.”

 

Eyebrows rising high, Cas looks back to Dean.

 

“Tastes like ass,” Dean says, and Cas chokes on bacon and a laugh. Dean thumps Cas’ back. Cas coughs and glares, but the glare quickly softens into a smirk. As deliberate as a mile marker, Cas brings his bottle back to his lips and drinks.

 

Cas could reach out. He could take Dean by the horns of his helmet and force a kiss. He could ask for one. He could stick his tongue between Dean’s lips and Dean would still suck on it, and it is clear in the light of Cas’ eyes that Cas _knows_ this.

 

Cas doesn’t do it.

 

But he could.

 

And Dean would let him.

 

Maybe not in front of Sam, though.

 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cas says quietly.

  
  


They saddle up the horses, all three. They load their gear and attach their saddlebags. Connie and Charger don’t seem to give a shit that Cas is back, but Baby approaches him once she’s out of the stall. She doesn’t go for his pockets, either, instead actively nosing down for his hand. Dean tries to think of what Cas might have touched, besides Dean, that Baby likes the smell of, but she doesn’t lick or nibble.

 

Looking to Dean for vague permission first, Cas pulls out his healing hands spell, and Baby presses right up against him, her neck thunking against Cas’ side hard enough that Cas nearly staggers back.

 

“Wow,” Sam says, quiet, standing next to Dean.

 

“Yeah,” says Dean. Eating dragon souls is one thing, but this, this is another level of impressive entirely.

 

“Maybe he can save the world,” Sam says, and Cas looks over at them sharply.

 

“Eh,” Dean says, shrugging. “We’re probably all gonna die. C’mon, Sammy, we’re wasting daylight.”

 

They mount up and turn toward the north. They look at each other, Sam with his faith, Cas with his doubt, both with determination. What Dean has is something else, something stranger, but what he has most of all is a shield and a sword and steed he trusts.

 

Waving for his brother to take the lead, Dean shoots his lover a grin, and they ride.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thank you to [rachelindeed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed), [Seiji](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seiji/pseuds/seiji), and [Vyc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyc/pseuds/vyc) for beta'ing. Your help and support means a lot. 
> 
> To see what else I'm up to or get (potentially) faster responses to questions and comments, follow me on [tumblr](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/). I'm going to take a week off from posting, so nothing new next week. Thanks for reading, everyone!


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